Chapter 174 The Crown Jewel of Mathematics
Xu Chi is a versatile writer. He has written poetry, essays, worked as an editor, and translated famous works by Shelley, Tolstoy, Stendhal, etc. In the 1950s, he also went to the front line to interview and published many correspondence literature works.
His greatest achievement was in the field of reportage. Reportage is a literary genre that uses literary art to reflect social events and people's activities truthfully and promptly. It is an essay between news reports and novels, with the characteristics of both news and literature.
Last year, he accepted a commission from People's Literature and created a reportage entitled The Light of Geology based on the geologist Li Siguang, which caused quite a stir across the country.
Then, just as the National Science Conference was about to be held, the editors of People's Literature believed that the spring of science was coming. They began to think that if they could organize a reportage reflecting the field of science at this time, readers would definitely like to read it, and it could also promote the tide of ideological liberation. However, who should be written about? Who should be invited to write it? The editors remembered a folk story circulating in society: A foreign delegation visited China and asked to meet Professor Chen Jingrun, a great Chinese mathematician; at the same time, many "jokes" about his otherworldliness were spread, and people said he was a "Frankenstein."
After discussion, they all agreed to write about Chen Jingrun; as for the author, everyone thought of the famous writer Xu Chi. Since he could write about Li Siguang well, he could definitely write about Chen Jingrun well.
Xu Chi rushed from Wuhan and went to the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences accompanied by his editor. He collected a lot of materials from Chen Jingrun and wrote this article with the focus on his solution of the Goldbach conjecture.
After the article was published, it immediately caused a huge sensation. For a time, "Goldbach's Conjecture" became famous all over China, Chen Jingrun became almost a household name, and Goldbach's Conjecture became the most well-known mathematical problem in China.
The so-called Goldbach conjecture is a conjecture about the relationship between even numbers and prime numbers proposed by Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach in a letter to Leonhard Euler in 1742.
There are two specific versions: Strong Goldbach conjecture: every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers.
Weak Goldbach's conjecture: Every odd number greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three prime numbers.
Chen Jingrun promoted the strong Goldbach conjecture, which is somewhat obscure when expressed in strict mathematical language, so Xu Chi quoted a simpler way of writing: use "a+b" to express the following proposition: every large even number N can be expressed as A+B, where the number of prime factors of A and B does not exceed a and b respectively, so the Goldbach conjecture can be written as "1+1".
Entering the 20th century, mathematicians from all over the world continued to advance the proof of the Goldbach conjecture, starting from "9+9" and moving towards "1+1", among which Chinese mathematicians also made many contributions.
In 1956, Wang Yuan of China proved "3 + 4", and later proved "3 + 3" and "2 + 3".
In 1962, Pan Chengdong of China and Barban of the Soviet Union proved "1 + 5", and Wang Yuan of China proved "1 + 4".
In 1966, Chen Jingrun of China proved "1 + 2", that is, he proved that any sufficiently large even number can be expressed as the sum of two numbers, one of which is a prime number and the other is either a prime number or the product of two prime numbers. This is called "Chen's Theorem".
This is undoubtedly a world-class achievement. Xu Chi used this sentence in his article to describe the status of the Goldbach conjecture: "The queen of natural science is mathematics, the crown of mathematics is number theory, and the Goldbach conjecture is the jewel in the crown."
This metaphor is actually worth discussing. First of all, mathematics, strictly speaking, does not belong to natural science, but is a universal means for humans to strictly describe and deduce the abstract structures and patterns of things. It can be applied to any problem in the real world. All mathematical objects are essentially artificially defined.
In this sense, mathematics belongs to formal science rather than natural science.
Secondly, number theory does have a high status in the field of mathematics, and it can be called the crown, but there is definitely more than one crown of mathematics.
The same goes for Mingzhu. Even in the field of number theory, there are many problems that are no less important than the Goldbach conjecture, such as the twin prime conjecture, Mersenne primes, Fermat's theorem, and Riemann hypothesis. The significance of these problems is no less than that of the Goldbach conjecture, and some are even more important.
If the Goldbach conjecture is the jewel in the crown, then there are too many jewels in the crown, and the Goldbach conjecture is not even the biggest one.
However, for ordinary readers, this sentence is too attractive. Who doesn't want to crack the crown jewel and leave a name in history? So letters from all over the country flew to the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences like snowflakes.
Some people even went outside the Institute of Mathematics to claim that they had solved the problem and asked the experts inside to review their proofs. However, most of these people had no basic mathematical skills and their proofs were just fantasies. The influence of Xu Chi's article was so great that even decades later, there were still many folk scientists who claimed that they had solved the problem. The Ge Guess became almost the most popular problem for folk scientists.
There have always been many people outside the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who claim to have solved this difficult problem, forcing the institute to have no choice but to leave a few questions for the security guard. Anyone who claims to have solved the difficult problem should solve these three questions first. If they cannot, they should go back to where they came from.
If it can really be done, it wouldn't be a waste of time to invite one or two experts to come out and talk to him.
After reading the article, Huang Tunan had to admit that Xu Chi's writing was indeed attractive, no wonder it caused such a sensation.
He also had some subtle ideas. Since he was known as a young genius, he must achieve something, otherwise it would be a waste of this opportunity.
And the guessing game seems to be a very good topic with enough influence that it can cause a huge sensation as long as some achievements are made.
Even if I guessed it and the problem was not completely solved in later generations, there is no need to worry, because mathematicians in later generations still made some progress, and Huang Tunan just happened to have these papers in his mind.
However, it is a bit inappropriate to bring out the article right after entering school. After all, Huang Tunan has not yet started to study number theory in depth. Lu Qiujian gave him this article to motivate him, not really wanting him to solve this problem.
Don’t be in a hurry, take your time, learn number theory well first, and when the opportunity is right, publish these papers one by one.
(End of this chapter)
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