Alphonse de Polignac

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Alphonse de Polignac (1826–1863) was a French mathematician and aristocrat. He his known for Polignac's Conjecture.

His father, Jules de Polignac (1780-1847) was prime minister of Charles X until the Bourbon dynasty was overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830. Alphonse was born in London during his father's time as ambassador to the United Kingdom. In 1849 he was admitted to Polytechnique and went onto serve in the Crimean War as an artillery officer, achieving the rank of Captain.

He was also a historian, a poet, a musician, and authored a translation of the play Faust by Goethe.^[1]

His work in mathematics mainly focused on Number Theory and he specifically worked with prime numbers.

In his first year at Polytechnique Polignac formulated his eponymous conjecture, which states that:

For every positive integer k, there are infinitely many prime gaps of size 2k.

Polignac also conjectured Romanov's Theorem, which states that:

Every odd number larger than 3 can be written as the sum of an odd prime and a power of 2^[2]

The same year that he formulated his two most famous conjectures, Polignac also formulated a false conjecture which he presented to the Academy of Sciences. It incorrectly asserted that any odd number was equal to the power of 2 plus a prime number.^[3]

• de Polignac's formula
• Polignac family

• Weisstein, Eric W. "de Polignac's Conjecture". MathWorld.

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