Eduard Wirsing

Eduard Wirsing (28 June 1931 – 22 March 2022) was a German mathematician, specializing in number theory.

[2] Wirsing studied at the University of Göttingen and the Free University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1957 under the supervision of Hans-Heinrich Ostmann with thesis Über wesentliche Komponenten in der additiven Zahlentheorie (On Essential Components in Additive Number Theory).

Wirsing organized conferences on analytical number theory at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics.

[4] In 1960 he proved for algebraic number fields a generalization of Roth's 1955 Thue-Siegel-Roth theorem: Let

In 1967 he sharpened his theorem and proved a conjecture of Paul Erdős (each multiplicative function, which takes only the values 1 and

[6] In 1959 Wirsing gave an asymptotic estimate for the density of multiply perfect numbers.

[7] He gave in 1962 an elementary proof of a sharpened form of the prime-number theorem (with remainder).

About the same time, similar results were published by Robert Breusch (1960) and Enrico Bombieri (1962).

Elementary proofs of the prime number theorem were first published by Paul Erdős and Atle Selberg in 1949.

Wirsing is also known for his work on the Gauss-Kuzmin-Lévy distribution (named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, Rodion Kuzmin, Paul Lévy).