Definition:Stern Number/Historical Note
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Historical Note on Stern Number
On reading about Goldbach's Lesser Conjecture in $1856$, Moritz Abraham Stern and his students tested all the primes to $9000$, and found the counterexamples $5777$ and $5993$.
He then went on to investigate odd integers that cannot be represented in the form $2 a^2 + p$ where $a > 0$.
The odd integers that he and his students found were named Stern numbers by Laurent Hodges in his $1993$ paper which summarised the findings on this topic.
Sources
- 1856: Moritz A. Stern: Sur un assertion de Goldbach relative aux nombres impairs (Nouv. Ann. Math. Vol. 15: pp. 23 – 24)
- 1993: Laurent Hodges: A Lesser-Known Goldbach Conjecture (Math. Mag. Vol. 66: pp. 45 – 47) www.jstor.org/stable/2690477