Goldbach's Weak Conjecture/Historical Note

Historical Note on Goldbach's Weak Conjecture

 * 1923: It was proved by and  that the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis implies Goldbach's Weak Conjecture for sufficiently large numbers.


 * 1937: It was proved by, independently of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, that all sufficiently large numbers can be expressed as the sum of three primes.


 * 1939: 's student proved that $3^{14348907}$ is large enough.


 * 1997: Proved by, , and  that the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis implies Goldbach's Weak Conjecture.


 * 2002: and  lowered the threshold for 's result to approximately $n > e^{3100}$, which is roughly $2 \times 10^{1346}$. This gives an upper bound such that it is feasible to test any single odd number below that threshold. Though one can calculate: if a modern desktop were the size of a 1cm cube, one filled the solar system with such cubes and left them running the fastest known algorithms since the beginning of time, numbers larger than $10^{70}$ would remain untested. For this reason the problem is still considered unsolved, though the existence of only finitely many counterexamples is a worthwhile result in its own right.


 * 2013: proves the conjecture.