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 20 figures behind the modern work who have died, 7 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
- 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
- Paul Erdős (1913-1996): Pioneering results on gaps between consecutive primes; the Erdős prize on prime gaps spurred the bounded-gaps breakthroughs
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Yuri Linnik (1915-1972): Invented the large sieve and the dispersion method
- 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
- 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
- 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