In Memoriam

Researchers in this directory who are no longer with us

The Top 100 and the regional pages list living researchers only, so the directory stays accurate for anyone using it to make contact. This page is the one place the directory remembers the 32 figures behind the modern work who have died, 27 of whom also carry a rank in this site's ranked pool.

This is a curated list, not a computed one. Who appears here is an editorial judgement: a person is listed because their work matters to this problem, and every entry is hand-checked. The Rank column shows the site's composite ranked-pool rank for those who carry one, so the quantitative signal stays visible, but it is a guide to the judgement rather than the thing that decides it. A dash means the person is not in the ranked pool at all, which is the normal case for careers that predate the arXiv and OpenAlex record the pipeline reads from. Sort any column; dashes always sort to the bottom.

Contributions

• Paul T. Bateman (1919-2012): The Bateman-Horn conjecture (1962) gives the conjectured density of primes taken simultaneously by several polynomials, the quantitative form of the twin prime and n^2+1 conjectures
• Viggo Brun (1885-1978): Created the modern sieve (Brun's sieve) and proved the sum of reciprocals of twin primes converges; Brun's constant is named for him
• Jingrun Chen (1933-1996): Proved Chen's theorem
• Sarvadaman Chowla (1907-1995): The Chowla conjecture on correlations of the Liouville function is the parity analogue of the twin prime and prime tuple conjectures, and recent progress on it came from the same circle of ideas
• Harold Davenport (1907-1969): The Davenport constant, the Davenport-Heilbronn theorems and his Multiplicative Number Theory, still a standard reference on primes in progressions and the zeros of L-functions
• Paul Erdős (1913-1996): Pioneering results on gaps between consecutive primes; the Erdős prize on prime gaps spurred the bounded-gaps breakthroughs
• Leonhard Euler (1707-1783): The Euler product joins the zeta function to the primes; Euler's 1742 letters with Goldbach state the conjecture in its modern form
• Patrick X. Gallagher (1935-2019): Pioneered large sieve theory and invented the larger sieve; his singular-series work underlies the Hardy-Littlewood prime-tuple heuristics
• Heini Halberstam (1926-2014): Co-author of the standard monograph Sieve Methods; the Elliott-Halberstam conjecture is central to bounded prime gaps
• G. H. Hardy (1877-1947): The Hardy-Littlewood circle method and prime k-tuple conjectures, including the conjectured asymptotic for twin primes, are the starting point of the modern theory
• Christopher Hooley (1928-2018): Hooley's theorem on Artin's conjecture under GRH; a leading figure in applying the Selberg sieve to problems on primes
• Aleksandar Ivić (1949-2020): Author of The Riemann Zeta-Function: Theory and Applications and The Theory of Hardy's Z-Function; power moments and the divisor problem
• Anatoly A. Karatsuba (1937-2008): Deep contributions to analytic number theory and the distribution of primes in short intervals
• Stanisław Knapowski (1931-1967): With Turan developed comparative prime number theory and studied sign changes of pi(x) - li(x)
• Edmund Landau (1877-1938): Posed the four problems on primes (Goldbach, twin primes, Legendre's conjecture, and n^2+1 primes) as unattackable at the 1912 International Congress of Mathematicians; foundational figure in analytic number theory
• Aleksandr Fedorovich Lavrik (1927-2010): Approximate functional equations for L-functions and work on the ternary Goldbach problem and primes in short intervals
• R. Sherman Lehman (1930-2023): Lehman's 1966 theorem bounding the first sign change of pi(x) - li(x), the basis of later Skewes-number bounds; also Lehman's factoring method (1974)
• Yuri Linnik (1915-1972): Invented the large sieve and the dispersion method
• J. E. Littlewood (1885-1977): The Hardy-Littlewood circle method and prime k-tuple conjectures underlie the Goldbach and twin prime problems; Littlewood's 1914 theorem that pi(x) - li(x) changes sign infinitely often
• Florian Luca (1969-2026): Prolific across additive and Diophantine number theory, including work on prime tuples and gaps between primes; ranked 5th on this board at the time of his death in late July 2026
• Hans-Egon Richert (1924-1993): Co-author of the standard monograph Sieve Methods (with Halberstam), the foundational reference for work on prime gaps
• Georg Johann Rieger (1931-2021): Additive number theory, the Goldbach and Waring problems, and the distribution of squarefree numbers
• Lowell Schoenfeld (1920-2002): The Rosser-Schoenfeld explicit bounds for prime-counting functions, and Schoenfeld's bound on pi(x) - li(x) under the Riemann hypothesis, are used without explanation
• Wolfgang Schwarz (1934-2013): Mean-value theorems for arithmetic functions and Ramanujan expansions; co-organizer of the Oberwolfach analytic number theory meetings
• Atle Selberg (1917-2007): Fields Medalist; the Selberg sieve is a foundational tool in all modern work on gaps between primes
• Daniel Shanks (1917-1996): With Wrench made the first large-scale computation of Brun's constant (1974), the sum of the reciprocals of the twin primes; author of the classic Solved and Unsolved Problems in Number Theory
• Pál Turán (1910-1976): Created the power-sum (Turan) method and applied it to the zeros of the zeta-function and to comparative prime number theory
• Yuan Wang (1930-2021): Major contributions to the circle method and sieve theory for problems on primes
• Marek Wolf (d. 2026): Extensive computational studies of prime gaps and the distribution of twin primes
• Dieter Wolke (1942-2015): Freiburg analytic number theorist whose research group page named additive questions, the Goldbach and twin prime problems, as its subject; doctoral advisor of Claus Bauer
• John W. Wrench (1911-2009): Computed the twin-prime constant and Artin's constant to high precision (1961), early machine work on the constants in the Hardy-Littlewood conjectures
• E. M. Wright (1906-2005): Co-author with Hardy of An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers (1938), the standard reference that number theorists cite simply as Hardy and Wright