Lev Schnirelmann

Lev Genrikhovich Schnirelmann (1905 to 1938), also spelled Shnirelman, was a mathematician born in Gomel, in what is now Belarus, who made lasting contributions to two separate areas, additive number theory and the topology of variational problems. He entered the University of Moscow in 1921 at the age of sixteen and was taught by Khinchin, Luzin and Urysohn, with Luzin advising him on his postgraduate work. Between 1927 and 1930 he worked with Lev Lyusternik on topological methods in the calculus of variations, showing that every surface homeomorphic to a sphere carries three closed geodesics and introducing the category of point sets as a topological invariant. In 1930 he brought new ideas to additive number theory and proved a weak form of the Goldbach conjecture, that every number is a sum of at most a fixed number of primes, with a first bound of about 300,000 that later mathematicians greatly improved. Elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1933, he died in Moscow at the age of 33, and accounts of how he died differ.