In Memoriam

Researchers in this directory who are no longer with us

The Top 100 and the regional pages list living researchers only, so the directory stays accurate for anyone using it to make contact. This page is the one place the directory remembers the 12 figures behind the modern work who have died, 12 of whom also carry a rank in this site's ranked pool.

This is a curated list, not a computed one. Who appears here is an editorial judgement: a person is listed because their work matters to this problem, and every entry is hand-checked. The Rank column shows the site's composite ranked-pool rank for those who carry one, so the quantitative signal stays visible, but it is a guide to the judgement rather than the thing that decides it. A dash means the person is not in the ranked pool at all, which is the normal case for careers that predate the arXiv and OpenAlex record the pipeline reads from. Sort any column; dashes always sort to the bottom.

Contributions

• Alan Baker (1939-2018): Fields Medalist; the theory of linear forms in logarithms gives effective bounds central to Diophantine problems related to the abc conjecture
• Jerzy Browkin (1934-2015): With Brzezinski formulated the n-conjecture (1994), the standard generalisation of abc to more than three terms, and his survey 'The abc-conjecture' is a reference account of the problem
• Harold Davenport (1907-1969): Davenport's 1965 inequality on the degree of f^3 - g^2 for polynomials is the result Stothers and Mason generalised into the polynomial abc theorem, the analogue that inspired the abc conjecture for integers
• Paul Erdős (1913-1996): The Erdős-Kac theorem, the elementary proof of the prime number theorem with Selberg, and hundreds of problems that shaped probabilistic and additive number theory
• G. H. Hardy (1877-1947): The Hardy-Littlewood circle method and prime k-tuple conjectures, including the conjectured asymptotic for twin primes, are the starting point of the modern theory
• Serge Lang (1927-2005): Lang's 1990 'Old and new conjectured Diophantine inequalities' set the abc conjecture inside the wider height-inequality programme, and the Lang and Vojta conjectures are the framework in which abc's consequences for rational points are stated. Died 12 September 2005. (Claude,2026-07-30)
• J. E. Littlewood (1885-1977): The Hardy-Littlewood circle method and prime k-tuple conjectures underlie the Goldbach and twin prime problems; Littlewood's 1914 theorem that pi(x) - li(x) changes sign infinitely often
• Florian Luca (1969-2026): One of the most prolific number theorists of his generation, with more than 800 papers and 350 coauthors on Diophantine equations, linear recurrence sequences and applications of the abc conjecture and its effective variants; ranked 5th on this board at the time of his death in late July 2026
• Lowell Schoenfeld (1920-2002): The Rosser-Schoenfeld explicit bounds for prime-counting functions, and Schoenfeld's bound on pi(x) - li(x) under the Riemann hypothesis, are used without explanation
• Walter Wilson Stothers (1946-2009): Proved the polynomial abc (the Mason-Stothers theorem) in 1981, independently of and shortly before R. C. Mason; the polynomial statement is the analogue that inspired the abc conjecture for integers
• Lucien Szpiro (1941-2020): The Szpiro conjecture on elliptic curve conductors and discriminants is essentially equivalent to the abc conjecture; a central figure in arithmetic geometry
• E. M. Wright (1906-2005): Co-author with Hardy of An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers (1938), the standard reference that number theorists cite simply as Hardy and Wright