Lev Schnirelmann

Lew Genrichowitsch Schnirelman (also Schnirelmann, Russian Лев Генрихович Шнирельман; * 2 Januarjul / January 15 1905greg in Gomel, .. † September 24, 1938 in Moscow) was a Russian mathematician who worked on additive number theory and differential geometry.

Schnirelmann was the son of a teacher who showed an early talent for mathematics and began in 1921 with the studies of mathematics at Moscow State University in Moscow, where he heard Alexander Khinchin, Pavel Urysohn and Nikolai Luzin. In 1929, he taught mathematics at the Polytechnic Institute in Novocherkassk. In 1930 he was back at the University of Moscow and in 1931 at the University of Göttingen with Edmund Landau. In 1933 he was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences and taught from 1934 at the mathematical institute. In 1935 he was appointed head of the newly founded Department of Number Theory at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University. In 1938 he committed suicide ( as Lev Pontryagin in his memoirs ). Immediately before had been invited to an interrogation of the NKVD.

With Lasar Ljusternik he worked in the late 1920s on topological methods in the calculus of variations, in which they broke, among other things, the problem of Poincaré on the existence of at least three closed geodesics on convex closed surfaces in three-dimensional space. Previously, George David Birkhoff, whose methods they generalized the existence of a Geodetic had shown. The work thus opened field is called Ljusternik - Schnirelmann theory ( in the topology of the Ljusternik - Schnirelmann categories of closed sets are named after two ).

Leading the way were also his work on additive number theory, where he introduced the Schnirelmann density, demonstrating a set in the direction of Goldbach 's conjecture: Every natural number is the sum of less than 21 prime numbers ( Mathematische Annalen 1933 and lecture at the German Congress of Mathematicians 1931). Following the Goldbach 's conjecture (whose proof was the target of Schnirelmann ) takes a maximum of three primes.