Sun Zhiwei

Sun Zhiwei (Chinese: 孙智伟; pinyin: Sūn Zhìwěi; Wade–Giles: Sun Chih-wei, bornOctober 16, 1965) is a Chinese mathematician, working primarily in number theory, combinatorics, and group theory. He is a professor at Nanjing University.

Born in Huai'an, Jiangsu, Sun and his twin brother Sun Zhihong proved a theorem about what are now known as the Wall–Sun–Sun primes that guided the search for counterexamples to Fermat's last theorem.

In 2003, he presented a unified approach to three famous topics of Paul Erdős in combinatorial number theory: covering systems, restricted sumsets, and zero-sum problems or EGZ Theorem.

He used q-series to prove that any natural number can be represented as a sum of an even square and two triangular numbers. He conjectured, and proved with B.-K. Oh, that each positive integer can be represented as a sum of a square, an odd square and a triangular number. In 2009, he conjectured that any natural number can be written as the sum of two squares and a pentagonal number, as the sum of a triangular number, an even square and a pentagonal number, and as the sum of a square, a pentagonal number and a hexagonal number. He also raised many open conjectures on congruencesand posed over 100 conjectural series for powers of ${\displaystyle \pi }$.

In 2013 he published a papercontaining many conjectures on primes, one of which states that for any positive integer ${\displaystyle m}$ there are consecutive primes ${\displaystyle p_{k},\ldots ,p_{n}\ (k<n)}$ not exceeding ${\displaystyle 2m+2.2{\sqrt {m}}}$ such that ${\displaystyle m=p_{n}-p_{n-1}+...+(-1)^{n-k}p_{k}}$, where ${\displaystyle p_{j}}$ denotes the ${\displaystyle j}$-th prime.

In the paper, he refined Lagrange's four-square theorem in various ways and posed many related conjectures one of which is Sun's 1-3-5 conjecture.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory.