Harald Helfgott
fl. 1977, Lima, Peru
Peruvian mathematician who proved the ternary (weak) Goldbach conjecture unconditionally in 2013, ending a 250-year-old problem.
Harald Helfgott works in analytic number theory, additive combinatorics, and combinatorial group theory. He earned his PhD at Princeton in 2003 under Henryk Iwaniec and Peter Sarnak, then held positions at Yale, the Université de Montréal, and the University of Bristol before joining the CNRS in 2010 and becoming a Humboldt Professor at the University of Göttingen in 2015. In 2013 he released two arXiv preprints proving that every odd integer greater than 5 is the sum of three primes — the ternary or weak Goldbach conjecture — by sharpening both the major-arc and minor-arc estimates of the Hardy–Littlewood circle method and combining them with large-scale numerical verification. The result is now accepted as a complete, unconditional theorem. He received the Whitehead Prize (2010) and the Adams Prize (2011), and was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019.
Workplaces: CNRS, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, University of Göttingen
Peru, France, Germany