Lev Schnirelmann

Schnirelmann sought to prove Goldbach's conjecture. In 1930, using the Brun sieve, he proved that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than C prime numbers, where C is an effectively computable constant.[1][2]

His other fundamental work is joint with Lazar Lyusternik. Together, they developed the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category, as it is called now, based on the previous work by Henri Poincaré, George David Birkhoff, and Marston Morse. The theory gives a global invariant of spaces, and has led to advances in differential geometry and topology. They also proved the theorem of the three geodesics, that a Riemannian manifold topologically equivalent to a sphere has at least three simple closed geodesics.

Schnirelmann graduated from Moscow State University in 1925 and then worked at the Steklov Mathematical Institute from 1934 to 1938. His advisor was Nikolai Luzin.

Schnirelmann committed suicide in Moscow on September 24, 1938, for reasons that are not clear. According to Lev Pontryagin's memoir from 1998, Schnirelmann gassed himself, due to depression brought on by feelings of inability to work at the same high level as earlier in his career.[3][4] On the other hand, according to an interview Eugene Dynkin gave in 1988, Schnirelman took his own life after the NKVD tried to recruit him as an informer.[5]

• Inscribed square problem
• Schnirelmann density
• Schnirelmann's constant
• Schnirelmann's theorem

• Demidov, S. S. (2007). "The Moscow School of the Theory of Functions in the 1930s". Golden Years of Moscow Mathematics (Second ed.). American Mathematical Society. pp. 35–54. ISBN 978-0-8218-4261-4.

• Lev Schnirelmann at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Lev Genrihovich Schnirelmann, a popular article by V. Tikhomirov and V. Uspensky (in Russian)