Goldbach Conjecture

The Goldbach Conjecture is a yet

unproven conjecture stating that every
even integer greater than two is the sum
of two prime numbers. The conjecture has
been tested up to 400,000,000,000,000.

Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest

unsolved problems in number theory and
in all of mathematics.

For example,

etc.

Origins
In 1742, the Prussian mathematician
Christian Goldbach wrote a letter to
Leonhard Euler in which he proposed the
following conjecture:

Every integer greater than 2 can be

written as the sum of three primes.

He considered 1 to be a prime number, a

convention subsequently abandoned. So
today, Goldbach's original conjecture
would be written:

Every integer greater than 5 can

be written as the sum of three
primes.

Euler, becoming interested in the problem,

answered with an equivalent version of
the conjecture:

Every even number greater than 2

can be written as the sum of two
primes,

adding that he regarded this a fully certain

theorem ("ein ganz gewisses Theorema"),
in spite of his being unable to prove it.

The former conjecture is today known as

the "ternary" Goldbach conjecture, the
latter as the "strong" or "binary" Goldbach
conjecture. The conjecture that all odd
integers greater than 9 are the sum of
three odd primes is called the "weak"
Goldbach conjecture. Both questions have
remained unsolved ever since, although
the weak form of the conjecture is much
closer to resolution than the strong one.

The majority of mathematicians believe

the conjecture (in both the weak and
strong forms) to be true, at least for
sufficiently large integers, mostly based
on statistical considerations focusing on
the probabilistic distribution of prime
numbers: the bigger the number, the more
ways there are available for that number
to be represented as the sum of two or
three other numbers, and the more
"likely" it becomes that at least one of
these representations consists entirely of
primes.

A very crude version of the heuristic

probabilistic argument (for the strong
form of the Goldbach conjecture) is as
follows. The Prime Number Theorem
asserts that an integer selected at
random has roughly a

chance of being prime. Thus if is a large

even integer and is a number between 3
and

, then one might expect the probability of

and

simultaneously being prime to be

. This heuristic is non-rigorous for a

number of reasons: for instance, it
assumes that the events that and

are prime are statistically independent of

each other. Nevertheless, if one pursues
this heuristic, one might expect the total
number of ways to write a large even
integer as the sum of two odd primes to
be roughly

Since this quantity goes to infinity as

increases, we expect that every large even
integer has not just one representation as
the sum of two primes, but in fact has very
many such representations.

The above heuristic argument is actually

somewhat inaccurate, because it ignores
some correlations between the likelihood
of and

being prime. For instance, if is odd then

is also odd, and if is even, then

is even, a non-trivial relation because

(besides 2) only odd numbers can be
prime. Similarly, if is divisible by 3, and
was already a prime distinct from 3,
then

would also be coprime to 3 and thus be

slightly more likely to be prime than a
general number. Pursuing this type of
analysis more carefully, Hardy and
Littlewood in 1923 conjectured (as part of
their famous Hardy-Littlewood prime
tuple conjecture) that for any fixed

, the number of representations of a large

integer as the sum of primes

with

should be asymptotically equal to

where the product is over all primes , and

is the number of solutions to the equation

in modular arithmetic, subject to the

constraints

. This formula has been rigorously proven

to be asymptotically valid for

from the work of Vinogradov, but is still

only a conjecture when

. In the latter case, the above formula

simplifies to 0 when is odd and to

when is even, where is the twin

primes contant,

This asymptotic is sometimes known as

the extended Goldbach conjecture. The
strong Goldbach conjecture is in fact very
similar to the Twin Prime Conjecture, and
the two conjectures are believed to be of
roughly comparable difficulty.