About

Why this site exists

The Goldbach conjecture is over 280 years old and still open. The community working on it is small enough to enumerate and large enough to be hard to know completely. This site is a starting point for anyone wanting to know who is working on Goldbach today, where they are, and what they have been writing recently.

Who built it

Steve Hubbard built this as a final project for Math 17 (Data Analysis with R) at Irvine Valley College, Spring 2026. The pipeline is open and the methodology is documented. Suggestions, corrections, and additions are welcome.

Sources of error

• Surname matching is fragile. Mathematicians named Liu, Wang, or Pan may be conflated. The pipeline handles the worst cases via the name aliases file but misses are possible.
• Citation counts are influenced by adjacent fields. A researcher whose Goldbach work overlaps with cryptography or computer science may rank higher purely because those fields cite more.
• Coverage is biased toward digital publishing. Some senior mathematicians, especially from the Russian and Chinese schools, are underrepresented because their pre-internet papers aren't well-indexed.
• The Top 100 is not a verdict. It's a starting point. Use it alongside MathSciNet, your advisor, and your own reading.

Acknowledgments

Data sources: arXiv, OpenAlex, Mathematics Genealogy Project, Google Maps.

R packages: aRxiv, dplyr, ggplot2, ggmap, ggrepel, igraph, maths.genealogy, patchwork, ragg.

Citation

Hubbard, S. (2026). Who's Who in Goldbach Research. https://wwigr.org

License and reuse

The data on this site is built from public sources (arXiv, OpenAlex, MGP) under their respective license terms. The compiled list and methodology are released under CC-BY 4.0: feel free to reuse with attribution.