Christian Goldbach
1690–1764, Königsberg, Brandenburg-Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Moscow, Russia
Prussian mathematician remembered above all for the conjecture he discussed in a 7 June 1742 letter to Euler: in Goldbach's original formulation, every integer greater than 2 is the sum of three primes; Euler's equivalent modern form says every even integer greater than 2 is the sum of two primes.
Goldbach was born in Königsberg, the son of a Protestant minister, and studied law, medicine and some mathematics at the local university. From 1710 he travelled widely across Europe, meeting Leibniz in Leipzig in 1711 and beginning a long correspondence with him, and later meeting Nicolaus (I) and Nicolaus (II) Bernoulli. In 1725 he was appointed professor of mathematics and historian at the newly founded Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, and he served as its first recording secretary.
Goldbach spent the rest of his career in Russian state service, first as tutor to the young Tsar Peter II in Moscow and later in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg, rising to privy councillor. From 1729 he carried on a mathematical correspondence with Leonhard Euler that lasted some 35 years; in a letter of 7 June 1742 he discussed what is now called Goldbach's conjecture: Goldbach's original formulation was that every integer greater than 2 is the sum of three primes, while Euler's equivalent reformulation is the modern statement that every even integer greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. He died in Moscow in 1764.
Workplaces: Imperial Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Germany, Russia