Free Republic

An institution has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can solve a famous math problem that has puzzled mathematicians for more than a century. The Riemann hypothesis, first proposed by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann in 1859, is considered to be one of the hardest and most important unsolved problems of pure mathematics — the study of thinking about maths, rather than applying it to the real world. The hypothesis is based on the Riemann zeta function, also attributed to Bernhard Riemann. It states: “The real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2”. The...

“What he showed in the presentation is very unlikely to be anything like a proof of the Riemann hypothesis as we know it,” says Jørgen Veisdal, an economist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who has previously studied the Riemann hypothesis. “It is simply too vague and unspecific.” Veisdal added that he would need to examine the written proof more closely to make a definitive judgement. The Riemann hypothesis, one of the last great unsolved problems in math, was first proposed in 1859 by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It is a supposition about prime numbers, such...