ABSTRACT
Carl Friedrich Gauss, whom many people consider the greatest mathematician who ever lived, once described number theory as the “Queen of Mathematics”. Indeed, the integers (“whole numbers”), and the patterns they exhibit, have been the subject of fascination and study for literally thousands of years. Fermat’s Last Theorem and Hilbert’s Tenth Problem are at least mathematical problems that were eventually solved. There are other problems in number theory that remain unsolved to this date. A number of them are also easy to state. In mathematics, if a problem proves very difficult, it is fairly common to look at a related but simpler problem. Goldbach’s conjecture, if true, has an immediate consequence: every positive odd integer greater than 5 can be written as the sum of three primes.
