Mathematicians Of The Day

3rd April



On this day in 1753, Leonard Euler wrote to Christian Goldbach to say that he had confirmed Goldbach's conjecture that every odd integer could be written as 2n2+p2n^2 + p with p a prime for the first 2500 integers. A hundred years later, Moritz Stern found two counterexamples: 5777 and 5993.

Click on for a poster.


Quotation of the day

From Joseph Bertrand
How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?
Calcul des probabilités.