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 remembers the 3 key figures from the ranked pool who have passed away (the most highly ranked of the deceased), plus a separate listing of foundational figures whose careers predate the digital publication record our pipeline reads from.

Foundational figures

The pipeline behind this site ranks researchers whose work appears on arXiv or in OpenAlex, which mostly means careers active from the mid-1990s onward. The names below predate that coverage. Their work is the bedrock on which modern research is built. They are listed by last name; each contribution is noted at the bottom of the page.

Foundational figures: contributions

• Jingrun Chen (1933-1996): Chen's theorem; also proved that infinitely many n give n^2+1 a prime or a product of two primes
• Harold Davenport (1907-1969): Multiplicative Number Theory and major advances in the Hardy-Littlewood circle method for additive prime problems
• 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
• Yuri Linnik (1915-1972): The large sieve, the dispersion method, and Linnik's theorem on the least prime in an arithmetic progression
• Ming-Chit Liu (1937-2023): Set an effective record on the ternary Goldbach problem (with Tianze Wang, 2002); analytic number theory at HKU
• Chengdong Pan (1934-1997): Proved the (1,5) case toward Goldbach's conjecture (1962) and the (1,4) case (1963, independently and with Barban and Wang Yuan); founder of the Shandong University school of analytic number theory and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Georg Johann Rieger (1931-2021): Additive number theory, the Goldbach and Waring problems, and the distribution of squarefree numbers
• Andrzej Schinzel (1937-2021): Schinzel's Hypothesis H, which predicts infinitely many primes of the form n^2+1 and generalizes many prime-representation conjectures
• 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 the distribution of primes
• Askold Ivanovich Vinogradov (1929-1986): The Bombieri-Vinogradov theorem on the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions on average
• Yuan Wang (1930-2021): The Wang (1+4) result and major contributions to the circle method and sieve theory for additive prime problems

Key figures from ranked pool