Christian Goldbach was a Russian mathematician born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1690. Not much is known about his early life and education in Russia, but he was appointed to the position of mathematics professor and historian at the St. Petersburg Academy in 1725. Several years later, in 1728, Goldbach left the Academy to tutor Tsar Peter II. His position enabled him to tour Europe and to meet some of the greatest mathematical minds of the day. He began to correspond regularly with some of these men, including the great Swiss mathematician who had also held a professorship at St. Petersburg before moving to the Berlin Academy in 1741.

In a 1742 letter to Euler, Goldbach introduced his most famous mathematical theory, now known as Goldbach's conjecture, which states that every even number n that is greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers. Goldbach also made a second conjecture, known as the Ternary Goldbach Conjecture, which states that every odd number is the sum of three prime numbers. In 1764, Goldbach died at age 74 in Moscow, Russia, his conjectures still unproven. Soviet mathematicians Lev Shnirelman and Ivan Vinogradov made significant progress towards proving the second, ternary conjecture in the 1930s, and the Chinese mathematician Chen Jing Run made further advances in the early 1970s. However, Goldbach's original conjecture still lacks an absolute proof (although as of 1998 it had been verified up to 4 x 10¹⁴).