Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
§1. Introduction. Most prominent among the classical problems in additive number theory are those of Waring and Goldbach type. Although use of the Hardy–Littlewood method has brought admirable progress, the finer questions associated with such problems have yet to find satisfactory solutions. For example, while the ternary Goldbach problem was solved by Vinogradov as early as 1937 (see Vinogradov [16], [17]), the latter's methods permit one to establish merely that almost all even integers are the sum of two primes (see Chudakov [4], van der Corput [5] and Estermann [7]).