In Memoriam

Researchers in this directory who are no longer with us

The Top 100 and the regional pages list living researchers only, so the directory stays accurate for anyone using it to make contact. This page remembers the 4 key figures from the ranked pool who have passed away (the most highly ranked of the deceased), plus a separate listing of foundational figures whose careers predate the digital publication record our pipeline reads from.

Foundational figures

The pipeline behind this site ranks researchers whose work appears on arXiv or in OpenAlex, which mostly means careers active from the mid-1990s onward. The names below predate that coverage. Their work is the bedrock on which modern research is built. They are listed by last name; each contribution is noted at the bottom of the page.

Foundational figures: contributions

• Boris Bredikhin (1920-1994): Developed the dispersion method for the Goldbach and Waring problems; the Bredikhin-Linnik theorem on primes of the form a^2+b^2+1
• Jingrun Chen (1933-1996): Chen's theorem; also proved that infinitely many n give n^2+1 a prime or a product of two primes
• J. G. van der Corput (1890-1975): Van der Corput's method for exponential sums, foundational for the circle method and prime-distribution estimates
• Anatoly Karatsuba (1937-2008): Analytic number theory, exponential sums, and the distribution of primes in short intervals; founder of a major Russian school
• Edmund Landau (1877-1938): Posed the four problems on primes (Goldbach, twin primes, Legendre's conjecture, and n^2+1 primes) as unattackable at the 1912 International Congress of Mathematicians; foundational figure in analytic number theory
• Aleksandr Fedorovich Lavrik (1927-2010): Approximate functional equations for L-functions and work on the ternary Goldbach problem and primes in short intervals
• Yuri Linnik (1915-1972): The large sieve, the dispersion method, and Linnik's theorem on the least prime in an arithmetic progression
• Ming-Chit Liu (1937-2023): Set an effective record on the ternary Goldbach problem (with Tianze Wang, 2002); analytic number theory at HKU
• Hua Loo-Keng (1910-1985): Hua's lemma; founded the Chinese school of analytic number theory
• Chengdong Pan (1934-1997): Proved the (1,5) case toward Goldbach's conjecture (1962) and the (1,4) case (1963, independently and with Barban and Wang Yuan); founder of the Shandong University school of analytic number theory and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Hans-Egon Richert (1924-1993): Co-author of the standard monograph Sieve Methods (with Halberstam), the foundational reference for work on prime gaps
• Georg Johann Rieger (1931-2021): Additive number theory, the Goldbach and Waring problems, and the distribution of squarefree numbers
• Wolfgang Schwarz (1934-2013): Mean-value theorems for arithmetic functions and Ramanujan expansions; co-organizer of the Oberwolfach analytic number theory meetings
• Askold Ivanovich Vinogradov (1929-1986): The Bombieri-Vinogradov theorem on the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions on average
• Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov (1891-1983): Proved the ternary Goldbach conjecture for sufficiently large odd integers (1937); the Vinogradov method of exponential sums
• Yuan Wang (1930-2021): The Wang (1+4) result and major contributions to the circle method and sieve theory for additive prime problems
• John W. Wrench (1911-2009): Computed the twin-prime constant and Artin's constant to high precision (1961), early machine work on the constants in the Hardy-Littlewood conjectures

Key figures from ranked pool