Mathematicians Of The Day

3rd April



On this day in 1753, Leonard Euler wrote to Christian Goldbach to say that he had confirmed Goldbach's conjecture that every odd integer could be written as 2n2+p2n^2 + p with p a prime for the the first 2500 integers. A hundred years later, Moritz Stern found two counterexamples: 5777 and 5993.

The postage stamp of one of today's mathematicians at THIS LINK was issued in 1972.

Click on for a poster.


Quotation of the day

From Joseph Bertrand
The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.