Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis The Quest To Find hte Hidden Law Of Prime Numbers

PrologueIt All Begins with Zero It's one of those slate-gray summer days that more properly belong to mid-August than late May, one of those days in New York City when it is barely clear where the city ends and the sky begins. The hard-edged lines and Euclidean-inspired shapes that are building, sidewalk, and pavement all seem to fuse into one huge melted mass that slowly dissolves into the humid, breezeless, torpid air. On mornings like this, even this irrepressible metropolis seems to have slowed a notch, a muffled cacophony more bass than treble, as the city that never sleeps stumbles and shuffles to work. But here in Greenwich Village, at the corner of Mercer and West Fourth streets, where we find New York University's Warren Weaver Hall, the hazy torpor is interrupted by a localized high-energy eddy. Here, deep in the heart of the artistic rain forest that is "the Village," just across the street from the rock 'n' rolling nightclub the Bottom line, a stone's throw from the lofts and galleries that gave birth to Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and the Velvet Underground, is the home of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where at this moment there is an excitement worthy of any gallery opening in SoHo, or any new wave, next wave, or crest-of-the-wave musical performance. The lobby and adjacent plaza are teeming with mathematicians, a polyglot and international group, abuzz with excitement. Listen closely, and amid the multilingual, every-accent mathematical jibber-jabber you'll hear a lot of talk about nothing, or more properly a lot of talk about zero. Zero is not an uncommon topic of conversation in New York, but more often than not it's the "placeholder zeros" that are on the tip of the New Yorker's tongue. These are the zeros that stand in for the orders of magnitude by which we measure the intellectual, cultural, and financial abundance that is New York: one zero to mark the tens of ethnic neighborhoods, two for the hundreds of entertainment options, three for the thousands of restaurants, six for the millions of people, and, of course, the zeros upon zeros that mark the billions or even trillions of dollars that churn through the city every day. These are not the zeros of void, but the zeros of plenty. But, today, just one week past Memorial Day 2002, it's a zero of a different flavor which has attracted this eclectic group to downtown New York City. Here some of the world's greatest mathematicians are meeting to discuss and possibly, just possibly, witness the resolution of the most important unsolved problem in mathematics, a problem that holds the key to understanding the basic mathematical elements that are the prime numbers. The zeros that tip the tongues of these mathematical adventurers are zeta zeros,* and the air is electric with the feeling that perhaps this will be the day when we lay to rest the mystery of these zeros, which constitutes the Riemann hypothesis. For over a century mathematicians have been trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis: that is, to settle once and for all a gently asserted conjecture of Bernhard Riemann (18261866), who was a professor of mathematics at the University of Gottingen in Germany. Riemann is perhaps best known as the mathematician responsible for inventing the geometrical ideas upon which Einstein built his theory of general relativity. But in 1859, for one brief moment, Riemann turned his attention to a study of the long-familiar prime numbers. These are numbers like two, three, five, and seven, each divisible only by one and itself, fundamental numerical elements characterized by their irreducibility. Riemann took up the age-old problem of trying to find a rule which would explain the wayRockmore, Dan is the author of 'Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis The Quest To Find hte Hidden Law Of Prime Numbers', published 2006 under ISBN 9780375727726 and ISBN 0375727728.