Nationality Chinese Name Chen Jingrun | Role Mathematician Children Chen Youwei | |
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Alma mater Chinese Academy of SciencesXiamen University Died March 19, 1996, Beijing, China | ||
Chen Jingrun (simplified Chinese: 陈景润; traditional Chinese: 陳景潤; pinyin: Chén Jǐngrùn; Wade–Giles: Ch'en Ching-jun; Foochow Romanized: Dìng Gīng-ê̤ṳng, May 22, 1933 – March 19, 1996) was a Chinese mathematician who made significant contributions to number theory.
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Personal life
Chen was the third son in a large family from Fuzhou, Fujian, China. His father was a postal worker. Chen Jingrun graduated from the Mathematics Department of Xiamen University in 1953. His advisor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences was Hua Luogeng.
Research
His work on the twin prime conjecture, Waring's problem, Goldbach's conjecture and Legendre's conjecture led to progress in analytic number theory. In a 1966 paper he proved what is now called Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a semiprime (the product of two primes) – e.g., 100 = 23 + 7·11.
Commemorations
The Asteroid 7681 Chenjingrun was named after him.
In 1999, China issued an 80-cent postage stamp, titled The Best Result of Goldbach Conjecture, with a silhouette of Chen and the inequality:
Several statues in China have been built in memory of Chen. At Xiamen University, the names of Chen and four other mathematicians — Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Matti Jutila, Yuri Linnik, and Pan Chengdong — are inscribed in the marble slab behind Chen's statue (see image).