Christian Goldbach

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A letter from Goldbach to Leonhard Euler, dated June 7, 1742 greg. in which he expresses the presumption later named after him.

Christian Goldbach (* 18th March 1690 in Königsberg (Prussia) , † November 20 . Jul / 1. December  1764 greg. In Moscow ) was a German mathematician .

Life

He was born the son of a Protestant pastor and studied medicine and law at the Albertus University in his hometown. He then went on long study trips through Germany, England, the Netherlands, Italy and France from 1710 to 1724. He came into contact with many well-known mathematicians such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , Leonhard Euler , Nikolaus I Bernoulli and thereby acquired thorough mathematical knowledge. Back in Königsberg, he made the acquaintance of Georg Bernhard Bilfinger and Jakob Hermann . Both had been appointed to the newly founded St. Petersburg Academy by Tsar Peter the Great . Goldbach then applied in July 1725 to the President of the Academy Lorenz Blumentrost (1692–1755) for an office and received the post of professor of mathematics and history. At the first constituent meeting on December 27, 1725, he acted as secretary of the academy. In 1727 Goldbach was appointed teacher of the young Tsar Peter II and moved with him to Moscow. Starting in 1727, regular scientific correspondence with Leonhard Euler, who had been appointed to the Petersburg Academy, began, which lasted for several decades.

After the death of Peter II from smallpox in 1730, the entire court and the new Tsarina Anna moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Goldbach followed and resumed his activities in the academy. In 1737 he was appointed managing director of the academy together with Johann Daniel Schumacher (1690–1761). Despite the unstable and changeable political conditions in tsarist Russia, Goldbach managed to remain in the favor of the powerful throughout the period. In the 1740s he stopped his activities at the academy and took a well paid post in the Russian Foreign Ministry. He was later given the task of drafting principles for the education of princes of royal blood.

Goldbach undertook important work in the field of mathematics. It is especially because of its still neither nor contradictory evidence Goldbach's conjecture ( every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes . ) Announced he on June 7, 1742 greg. formulated in a letter to Euler. The Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest and most important unsolved problems of number theory .

Works

  • De transformatione serierum (1729)
  • De terminis generalibus serierum (1732)

literature

Web links

Commons : Christian Goldbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Original text of the letter (pdf; 111 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Goldbach, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1690
PLACE OF BIRTH Königsberg (Prussia)
DATE OF DEATH December 1, 1764
Place of death Moscow