Goldbach's 1742 letter to Euler

In the summer of 1742, Christian Goldbach, a famous Prussian mathematician and former tutor to Tsar Peter II, exchanged a series of letters with his friend, the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Out of this exchange came the Goldbach conjecture, which in its simplest form states: "every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes".

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