Training the Heavens

Chapter 174 The Crown Jewel of Mathematics
Xu Chi was a versatile writer. He wrote poetry, essays, worked as an editor, and translated famous works by Shelley, Tolstoy, Stendhal and others. In the 1950s, he 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 life events and people's activities truthfully and promptly. It is a kind of prose that lies between news reports and novels, and has 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 geologist Li Siguang, which caused quite a stir across the country.

Then, with the National Science Conference approaching, the editors of People's Literature, convinced that a scientific spring was approaching, began to ponder the possibility of publishing a reportage on science. Readers would surely appreciate it, and it would also promote a wave of intellectual liberation. However, who should they write the article for? And who should they hire?
The editors recalled a folk story circulating in society: A foreign delegation came to visit China and asked to meet China's great mathematician Professor Chen Jingrun; at the same time, many "jokes" about his otherworldly behavior were also spread, and people said that he was a "Frankenstein."

After discussion, they unanimously 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 versions:
Strong Goldbach conjecture: Every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers.

Weak Goldbach 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 was 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 9th century, mathematicians around the world continued to advance the proof of the Goldbach conjecture, starting from "9+1" and moving towards "1+", among which Chinese mathematicians also made considerable 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: "Mathematics is the queen of natural sciences, number theory is the crown of mathematics, and the Goldbach conjecture is the jewel in the crown."

This analogy is actually questionable. First, mathematics, strictly speaking, is not a natural science. Rather, it is a universal method for humans to rigorously describe and deduce abstract structures and patterns in objects. It can be applied to any problem in the real world, and all mathematical objects are essentially human-defined. In this sense, mathematics belongs to the formal sciences, not the natural sciences.

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 in 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 was too attractive. Who wouldn't want to crack the crown jewel and leave their 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 and claimed that they had solved the problem, and asked the experts inside to review their proof. However, most of these people did not have basic mathematical skills, so their solution was just a delusion?
The influence of Xu Chi's article was so great that even decades later, there were still many amateur scientists claiming to have solved this problem. Ge Guess has almost become the most popular problem among amateur scientists.

There have always been people outside the Institute of Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who claim to have solved this difficult problem. The institute has been forced into a corner and can only 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 can't, they will be sent back to where they came from.

If it can really be done, then it wouldn't be a waste of time to invite one or two experts to come out and talk to him.

After reading this 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 genius boy, 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 later generations did not completely solve it, there is no need to worry, because later mathematicians still made some progress, and Huang Tunan happened to have these papers in his mind.

However, it is a bit inappropriate to take 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 to let him solve this problem.

Don’t be in a hurry, take your time, study number theory well first, and when the opportunity is right, publish these papers one by one.

(End of this chapter)