Yuan Wang

Yuan Wang, an analytical number theorist, was born in Lan Xi City in April 1930 and passed away in Beijing in May 2021. He was a faculty member of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1980, he became one of the earliest elected members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences after the cultural revolution. In 1984, he was granted a "National Outstanding Young and Middle-aged Experts with Outstanding Contributions" award in China. In 1999, he was awarded the Loo-Keng Hua Mathematics Prize. In the 1950s to early 1960s, Wang first applied the Sieve method in analytic number theory to the study of Goldbach conjecture. He proved the proposition 3+4, and then 2+3 in 1957 (i.e., every sufficiently large even number can be expressed as the product of at most two prime numbers and the product of at most 3 prime numbers). This is the first time that China has leaped onto the world stage in this field of research. Later, he and Loo-Keng Hua collaborated on the application of number theory in numerical analysis. Their 1973 work was known by the international community as the "Hua-Wang Method." In the 1980s, he explored a new field--algebraic number theory--and made contributions in the analysis of Diophantine inequalities.