Chen Jingrun

Chen Jingrun (1933 to 1996) was a Chinese mathematician from Fuzhou in Fujian who worked in analytic number theory. He graduated from the Mathematics Department of Xiamen University in 1953 and later worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where his advisor was Hua Luogeng. His research touched the twin prime conjecture, Waring's problem, Goldbach's conjecture and Legendre's conjecture. In a 1966 paper he proved the result now called Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a number that is either a prime or a semiprime, the product of two primes. He kept expanding the proof through the 1970s despite being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. A 1978 biography by Xu Chi, Goldbach's Conjecture, made him a household name in China. He died of complications of pneumonia in 1996, aged 62, and the asteroid 7681 Chenjingrun is named after him.