Sun Zhiwei

Who is Sun Zhiwei?

Zhi-Wei Sun is a Chinese mathematician, working primarily on number theory, combinatorics, and group theory. Currently he works as a professor in 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 congruences and posed over 100 conjectural series for powers of .