The Let’s prove Goldbach! project, as the name says, has the goal of proving Goldbach’s Conjecture. We doubt to be successful in this challenge, but we think that, like in any challenge, the most important thing is not to reach the goal, but the way traveled for achieving it. Behind a problem like Goldbach’s Conjecture there may be a fascinating chain of ideas and mathematical constructions, and that is the aspect we are interested in, no matter wether someone finally will be successful in proving it or not.
To those who believe that the goal is too difficult and therefore not worth trying, we would like to propose a reflection. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, but many times the opposite is true: precisely because we do not dare to do them, they are difficult. This reflection dates back to the Latin writer Seneca, and the Latin sentence reported under the name of the site is the one with which he expressed this concept. We chose this sentence as our motto because it well represents the spirit with which we approach the Conjecture, despite it being considered a very difficult problem.
But when involving new people we can be impeded by several factors:
- The first factor is language: for this reason we have created and maintain constantly updated this English version of the website.
- The second factor is knowledge: we don’t demand our readers to already have our mathematical knowledge, but we want to put them into the condition of being able to acquire it. So we created the two main educational sections of the site: the one about dashed line theory, that resumes the original work (in Italian) published in 2010, explaining it as simply as possible, and the one about number theory, whose goal is to impart soma basic notions of number theory, the branch of Mathematics in which Goldbach’s Conjecture situates.
- Lastly, another factor that can impede the envolvement of new people into our project, perhaps the most important one, in enthusiasm. We can’t do much about that, because it depends for most part on the single individual, but we’ll try to foster it with our way to explain and to organize the material and, in the next future, also with an entire section devoted to our proof techniques, and raffling some prizes for who will help us to prove some things (while we are working on these new sections, you can help up to collect the jackpot with a donation).