Lev Schnirelmann

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Lev G. Schnirelmann.
Lev G. Schnirelmann.

Lev Genrikhovich Schnirelmann (Russian: Лев Генрихович Шнирельман), also Shnirelman, Shnirel'man (born January 2, 1905 in Gomel, died September 24, 1938 in Moscow) was a Soviet mathematician who sought to prove Goldbach's conjecture. In 1931, using the Brun sieve, he proved that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than 300,000 prime numbers.

His other fundamental work is joint with Lazar Lyusternik. Together, they developed the Lyusternik-Schnirelmann category, as it is called now, based on the previous work by Henri Poincaré, David Birkhoff, and Marston Morse. The theory gives a global invariant of spaces, and has led to advances in differential geometry and topology.

According to Pontryagin's memoir, Schnirelmann committed suicide in Moscow.[1]

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