Sun Zhiwei

Zhi-Wei Sun (Chinese: 孙智伟; pinyin: Sūn Zhìwěi; Wade–Giles: Sun Chihwei, born October 16, 1965) is a Chinese mathematician, working primarily in number theory, combinatorics, and group theory. He is currently a professor at Nanjing University.

Born in Huai'an, Jiangsu, Sun and his twin brother Sun Zhihong proved a theorem about what are now known as the Wall–Sun–Sun primes that guided the search for counterexamples to Fermat's last theorem.

In 2003, he presented a unified approach to three famous topics of Paul Erdős in combinatorial number theory: covering systems, restricted sumsets, and zero-sum problems or EGZ Theorem.

He used q-series to prove that any natural number can be represented as a sum of an even square and two triangular numbers. He conjectured, and proved with B.-K. Oh, that each positive integer can be represented as a sum of a square, an odd square and a triangular number. In 2009, he conjectured that any natural number can be written as the sum of two squares and a pentagonal number, as the sum of a triangular number, an even square and a pentagonal number, and as the sum of a square, a pentagonal number and a hexagonal number. He also raised many open conjectures on congruences and posed over 100 conjectural series for powers of π .

In 2013 he published a paper containing many conjectures on primes, one of which states that for any positive integer m there are consecutive primes p k , … , p n   ( k < n ) not exceeding 2 m + 2.2 m such that m = p n − p n − 1 + . . . + ( − 1 ) n − k p k , where p j denotes the j -th prime.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory.