Olivier Ramaré is a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

who works as Senior researcher for the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

. He is currently attached to Aix-Marseille Université. Ramaré earned a doctorate in 1991 from the

University of Bordeaux The University of Bordeaux (, ) is a public research university based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France. It has several campuses in the cities and towns of Bordeaux, Dax, Gradignan, Périgueux, Pessac, and Talence. There are al ...

with a dissertation ''Contribution au problème de Goldbach : tout entier >1 est somme d'au plus treize nombres premiers'' (''Contribution to Goldbach's problem: any integer >1 is the sum of at most thirteen prime numbers'') supervised by Jean-Marc Deshouillers. In 1995, he sharpened earlier work on Schnirelmann's theorem by proving that every even number is a sum of at most six

prime A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

s. This result may be compared with

Goldbach's conjecture Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known list of unsolved problems in mathematics, unsolved problems in number theory and all of mathematics. It states that every even and odd numbers, even natural number greater than 2 is the ...

, which states that every even number except 2 is the sum of two primes. The truth of Ramaré's result for all sufficiently large even numbers is a consequence of

Vinogradov's theorem In number theory, Vinogradov's theorem is a result which implies that any sufficiently large odd integer can be written as a sum of three prime numbers. It is a weaker form of Goldbach's weak conjecture, which would imply the existence of such a re ...

, whereas the full result follows from

Goldbach's weak conjecture In number theory, Goldbach's weak conjecture, also known as the odd Goldbach conjecture, the ternary Goldbach problem, or the 3-primes problem, states that : Every odd number greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three prime number, prime ...

. In turn, Ramaré's result was strengthened by

Terence Tao Terence Chi-Shen Tao (; born 17 July 1975) is an Australian-American mathematician, Fields medalist, and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the Co ...

who proved in 2014 that every odd number is the sum of at most five primes, and by

Harald Helfgott Harald Andrés Helfgott (born 25 November 1977) is a Peruvian mathematician working in number theory. Helfgott is a researcher ('' directeur de recherche'') at the CNRS at the Institut Mathématique de Jussieu, Paris. He is best known for submitt ...

's claimed proof of

.; for Helfgoot and the weak Goldbach conjecture, see the MR review of Tao's paper

References

External links

* * 20th-century French mathematicians 21st-century French mathematicians Living people Year of birth missing (living people) French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists French number theorists {{France-mathematician-stub