primes less than or equal to a large number N is close to the value of the integral In 1859 Bernhard Riemann used complex analysis and a special meromorphic function now known as the Riemann zeta function to derive an analytic expression for the number of primes less than or equal to a real number x. Remarkably, the main term in Riemann's formula was exactly the above integral, lending substantial weight to Gauss's conjecture. Riemann found that the error terms in this expression, and hence the manner in which the primes are distributed, are closely related to the complex zeros of the zeta function. Using Riemann's ideas and by getting more information on the zeros of the zeta function, Jacques Hadamard and Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin managed to complete the proof of Gauss's conjecture. In particular, they proved that if then This remarkable result is what is now known as the prime number theorem. It is a central result in analytic number theory. Loosely speaking, it states that given a large number N, the number of primes less than or equal to N is about N/log(N). More generally, the same question can be asked about the number of primes in any arithmetic progression a+nq for any integer n. In one of the first applications of analytic techniques to number theory, Dirichlet proved that any arithmetic progression with a and q coprime contains infinitely many primes. The prime number theorem can be generalised to this problem; letting then if a and q are coprime, There are also many deep and wide-ranging conjectures in number theory whose proofs seem too difficult for current techniques, such as the twin prime conjecture which asks whether there are infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is prime. On the assumption of the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture it has been proven recently that there are infinitely many primes p such that p + k is prime for some positive even k at most 12. Also, it has been proven unconditionally (i.e. not depending on unproven conjectures) that there are infinitely many primes p such that p + k is prime for some positive even k at most 246. Additive number theory One of the most important problems in additive number theory is Waring's problem, which asks whether it is possible, for any k ≥ 2, to write any positive integer as the sum of a