This new paperback edition of Rockmore’s 2005 hardcover original re-introduces mathe-fanatics to the dizzying world of Bernhard Riemann, the genius behind the legendary Riemann Hypothesis. More famous to the general public as the man who developed the multi-dimensional geometry that opened the door to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Riemann also hypothesized a technique for predicting the occurrence of prime numbers. So — what’s the big deal? Some theorists feel that prime numbers — those unique, frustrating amounts like 17 and 31 which can’t be divided by anything else — are the key to everything in the known universe. The problem is that prime numbers seem to occur randomly, and no one has ever figured out a way to reliably predict which numbers will be prime, aside from laboriously calculating them out one by one. That is, until Reimann, who published his hypothesis in 1859 — the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species. And just like with the Origin, lesser scientists have been trying to prove it ever since. But unlike evolution, which even a young student can grasp, the Riemann Hypothesis is so esoteric, and so incomprehensible to the average amateur enthusiast, that it can barely even be described in simplified terms, much less spelled out explicitly. But Rockmore does an admirable job in trying to draw the general reader into the dizzying heights of number theory: along the way you’ll encounter harmonic frequencies, the complex plane, and the dreaded “zeta zeroes,” which are the source of the still unproved mystery of the Riemann Hypothesis. In essence, Reimann concocted a counter-intuitive mathematical formula that produces a series of answers that almost exactly matches the apparently random sequence of prime numbers. What has driven mathematicians to distraction ever since is that no one can figure out why, or how a regular equation can magically predict a random series. A million-dollar prize awaits anyone who can prove the Riemann Hypothesis, a prize that — even after 150 years — remains unclaimed.
Grade: A-
Dibs! » Mathematical Community Greets Earth-Shattering Claims With Silence Says:
October 6th, 2006 at 4:46 pmVisit Dibs! » Mathematical Community Greets Earth-Shattering Claims With Silence
[...] In response to one of the very earliest Dibs! posts — a review of Dan Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis — Dibs! has recently received an astonishing email from Jiang Chun-Xuan, a mathematician in China who claims to have disproved the legendarily difficult problem. Chun-Xuan included in his email a detailed mathematical paper (which you can view online in pdf form here) which purports to conclusively demonstrate that Riemann’s hypothesis is in fact false. Why did Chun-Xuan bother to notify a lowly literary blog of his epochal discovery? Therein lies a tale — and here the story starts to get even more mystifying. (If you’re wondering what the Reimann Hypothesis even is, click on the review of the Rockmore book above for an explanation.) [...]