Heath-Brown is known for many striking results. He proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form x3 + 2y3.[6]
In collaboration with S. J. Patterson in 1978 he proved the Kummer conjecture on cubic Gauss sums in its equidistribution form.
He has applied Burgess's method on character sums to the ranks of elliptic curves in families.
He proved that every non-singular cubic form over the rational numbers in at least ten variables represents 0.[7]
Heath-Brown also showed that Linnik's constant is less than or equal to 5.5.[8] More recently, Heath-Brown is known for his pioneering work on the so-called determinant method. Using this method he was able to prove a conjecture of Serre[9] in the four variable case in 2002.[10] This particular conjecture of Serre was later dubbed the "dimension growth conjecture" and this was almost completely solved by various works of Browning, Heath-Brown, and Salberger by 2009.[11]
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[15] In 2022 the Royal Society awarded him the Sylvester Medal "for his many important contributions to the study of prime numbers and solutions to equations in integers".[16]
^Heath-Brown, D. R. (1983). "Cubic Forms in Ten Variables". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. Series 3. 47 (2): 225–257. doi:10.1112/plms/s3-47.2.225.
^Castryck, Wouter; Cluckers, Raf; Dittmann, Philip; Nguyen, Kien Huu (2020). "The dimension growth conjecture, polynomial in the degree and without logarithmic factors". Algebra & Number Theory. 14 (8): 2261–2294. arXiv:1904.13109. doi:10.2140/ant.2020.14.2261. S2CID140223593.