At the 1912 International Congress of Mathematicians, Edmund Landau listed four basic problems about prime numbers. These problems were characterised in his speech as "unattackable at the present state of mathematics" and are now known as Landau's problems. They are as follows:

As of 2025^[update], all four problems are unresolved.

Goldbach's weak conjecture, every odd number greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three primes, is a consequence of Goldbach's conjecture. Ivan Vinogradov proved it for large enough n (Vinogradov's theorem) in 1937, and Harald Helfgott extended this to a full proof of Goldbach's weak conjecture in 2013.

Chen's theorem, another weakening of Goldbach's conjecture, proves that for all sufficiently large n, ${\displaystyle 2n=p+q}$ where p is prime and q is either prime or semiprime. Bordignon, Johnston, and Starichkova, correcting and improving on Yamada, proved an explicit version of Chen's theorem: every even number greater than ${\displaystyle e^{e^{32.7}}\approx 1.4\cdot 10^{69057979807814}}$ is the sum of a prime and a product of at most two primes. Bordignon and Starichkova reduce this to ${\displaystyle e^{e^{15.85}}\approx 3.6\cdot 10^{3321634}}$ assuming the Generalized Riemann hypothesis (GRH) for Dirichlet L-functions. Johnston and Starichkova give a version working for all n ≥ 4 at the cost of using a number which is the product of at most 395 primes rather than a prime or semiprime; under GRH they improve 395 to 31.

Montgomery and Vaughan showed that the exceptional set of even numbers not expressible as the sum of two primes has a density zero, although the set is not proven to be finite. The best current bounds on the exceptional set is ${\displaystyle E(x)<x^{0.72}}$ (for large enough x) due to Pintz, and ${\displaystyle E(x)\ll x^{0.5}\log ^{3}x}$ under RH, due to Goldston.

Linnik proved that large enough even numbers could be expressed as the sum of two primes and some (ineffective) constant K of powers of 2. Following many advances (see Pintz for an overview), Pintz and Ruzsa improved this to K = 8. Assuming the GRH, this can be improved to K = 7.

In 2013 Yitang Zhang showed that there are infinitely many prime pairs with gap bounded by 70 million, and this result has been improved to gaps of length 246 by a collaborative effort of the Polymath Project. Under the generalized Elliott–Halberstam conjecture this was improved to 6, extending earlier work by Maynard and Goldston, Pintz and Yıldırım.

In 1966 Chen showed that there are infinitely many primes p (later called Chen primes) such that p + 2 is either a prime or a semiprime.