Overview

THE PRIME SUSPECT: What Bernhard Riemann Discovered and Why the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics Has His Name In November 1859, a thirty-two-year-old mathematician submitted an eight-page paper to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Almost as an aside, he mentioned a property he had tried - and failed - to prove. He moved on. The paper ended. That aside is now worth one million dollars. The Riemann Hypothesis has remained unproved for 167 years. Every great mathematician who has attacked it - Hardy, Hilbert, Selberg, Bombieri - has failed. It sits at the top of the Clay Mathematics Institute's list of the seven greatest unsolved problems in the world. And yet the question itself - what Riemann actually claimed, and why it matters - has never been explained to general readers with the seriousness it deserves. Until now. The Prime Suspect is written for the curious non-mathematician: the reader who has always suspected that the great unsolved problems of mathematics are more interesting than they've been told, and who wants a real explanation, not a reassuring blur. No advanced mathematics is required. What is required is a willingness to follow an argument - and a curiosity about one of the strangest and most beautiful ideas in the history of human thought. You will meet Bernhard Riemann himself: a poor pastor's son from rural Germany, educated far beyond his circumstances, anxious and frequently ill, productive for eleven years and dead at thirty-nine. In those eleven years he transformed mathematics in ways that are still reverberating - including the geometry that Einstein would later need for general relativity. And in one eight-page paper, almost in passing, he posed the question that has never been answered. You will understand what the Riemann Hypothesis actually says. You will see how the prime numbers - the atoms of arithmetic, the foundation of all internet security - connect to a function of an imaginary variable in a way that nobody predicted and nobody has fully explained. You will learn why the zeros of the zeta function turn up in quantum physics. And you will understand why mathematicians have spent 167 years failing to close the gap between what Riemann suspected and what anyone has been able to prove. The zeros are where he said they probably were. Nobody knows why they have to be. This is the book that finally explains why the world's greatest mathematical mystery deserves your attention.

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