Chen Jingrun

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Chen Jingrun bigraphy, stories - Chinese mathematician

Chen Jingrun : biography

May 22, 1933 – March 19, 1996

Chen Jingrun ( May 22, 1933 – March 19, 1996) was a Chinese mathematician who made significant contributions to number theory.

Commemorations

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) ge frac{(log x)^2}.

Several statues in China have been built in memory of Chen. At Xiamen University, the names of Chen and four other mathematicians — Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Matti Jutila, Yuri Linnik, and Pan Chengdong — are inscribed in the marble slab behind Chen’s statue (see image).

Works

  • 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.

Research

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 a prime and a semiprime (the product of two primes) — e.g., 100 = 23 + 7·11.

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.