Christian Goldbach

Prussian mathematician, lawyer and diplomat, mostly self-taught in mathematics, who spent his career in Russian state service: professor of mathematics and historian at the newly founded St Petersburg Academy from 1725, tutor to the boy tsar Peter II from 1728, and eventually a privy councillor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Goldbach is remembered today almost entirely for one 1742 letter: writing to his long-time correspondent Leonhard Euler, he proposed that every integer greater than two is the sum of three primes, and Euler replied with the equivalent, now-standard form concerning even numbers, the conjecture that still carries Goldbach's name. The two corresponded for roughly thirty-five years, from 1729 until Goldbach's death, on number theory and much else besides.