Chen Jingrun

Template:ChineseText Template:Chinese-name Chen Jingrun (simplified Chinese: 陈景润; traditional Chinese: 陳景潤; pinyin: Chén Jǐngrùn; Wade–Giles: Ch'en Chingjun, May 22 1933–March 19 1996) was a Chinese mathematician who made significant contributions to number theory. Chen is ranked as one of the leading mathematicians in the twentieth century and one of China's most influential mathematicians in history.

Personal life

Chen was the third son in a large family from Fuzhou, Fujian, China. His father was a postal worker. Chen Jingrun graduated from the Mathematics Department of Xiamen University in 1953. His advisor at Chinese Academy of Sciences was Hua Luogeng.

His work on the twin prime conjecture, Waring's problem, Goldbach's conjecture and Legendre's conjecture led to progress in analytic number theory. In a 1966 paper he proved what is now called Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of either two primes, or a prime and a semiprime (the product of two primes) — e.g., 100 = 23 + 7·11.

The Asteroid 7681 Chenjingrun was named after him.

In 1999, China issued an 80-cent postage stamp, titled The Best Result of Goldbach Conjecture, with a silhouette of Chen and the inequality:

P_{x}(1,2)\geq {\frac {0.67xC_{x}}{(\log x)^{2}}}.

J.-R. Chen, On the representation of a large even integer as the sum of a prime and a product of at most two primes, Sci. Sinica 16 (1973), 157–176.
Chen, J.R, "On the representation of a large even integer as the sum of a prime and the product of at most two primes". [Chinese] J. Kexue Tongbao 17 (1966), 385–386.