Wednesday, April 13, 2005

 

Nerd Moment

This WSJ piece (subscription required) is about the fact that some mathematicians are closing in on proving the "Reimann hypothesis." The proof is worth a million bucks! Interested now?
Riemann wanted to fathom why the heck primes were related to logarithms. He suspected he might find a clue in a formula that adds up 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1-over-every-other-counting-number, but with the twist that each fraction is raised to an exponent (multiplied by itself some number of times). For bizarre exponents -- those that use the imaginary number the square root of -1 -- this sum equals zero. Riemann guessed at the general form of these "magical exponents." If his hypothesis is right, then mathematicians will know how primes thin out along the number line.
Are you asleep yet? Let me put it to you this way -- most encoding systems are based on prime numbers. If the hypothesis can be proven, it might make it much easier to break various codes, from military radio codes, to the encryption that protects you online sales transactions. Now you should be interested.

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