George Brandt, born in Riddarhyttan, Skinnskatteberg parish, Västmanland to Jurgen Brandt, a mineowner and pharmacist, and Katarina Ysing, is a professor of chemistry at Uppsala University.

He is able in about 1735 to show that cobalt is the source of the blue color in glass, which previously had been attributed to the bismuth found with cobalt.

He thus becomes the first person to discover a metal unknown in ancient times.

Christian Goldbach, born in the Duchy of Prussia's capital Königsberg, part of Brandenburg-Prussia, was the son of a pastor.

He had studied at the Royal Albertus University.

After finishing his studies he had undertaken long educational voyages from 1710 to 1724 through Europe, visiting other German states, England, Holland, Italy, and France, meeting with many famous mathematicians, such as Gottfried Leibniz, Leonhard Euler, and Nicholas I Bernoulli.

Back in Königsberg, he became acquainted with Georg Bernhard Bilfinger and Jakob Herman.

He had gone on to work at the newly opened St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1725.

Later on, he was a tutor to the later Tsar Peter II in 1728.

He enters the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1742.

[Goldbach is most noted for his correspondence with Leibniz, Euler, and Bernoulli, especially in his 1742 letter to Euler stating his Goldbach's conjecture, one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics.

It states: Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

The conjecture has been shown to be correct up through 4 × 1018 and is generally assumed to be true, but no mathematical proof exists despite considerable effort.

George Brandt finally determines in 1742 that the presence of cobalt is responsible for the blue color of some promising copper-bearing ores of Germany’s Harz Mountains.