Sometimes I like to sharpen my mind a little (only just) with a math article or two, to see how little I remember calculus from high school and college.
Namely, articles like this one. It covers the search for a proof to the Riemann zeta function; which would, according to the author:
Almost a century later, the Riemann hypothesis is still unsolved. Its glamour is unequalled because it holds the key to the primes, those mysterious numbers that underpin so much of math-ematics. And now whoever cracks it will find not only glory in posterity, but a tidy reward in this life: a $1 million prize announced this April by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Also, the zeta function has had its time in the popular fiction spotlight as well, appearing in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. How much do you remember from high school or college math?!
zip, nada! and i’m glad. dont need those mind boggling functions to solve!
nothing much, except for the tesseract… the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, oh and that any number multipled with nine will yield a number whose digits add up to nine, or another multiple of nine…
i recently taught myself to add using binary numbers… it was fun
OK, I went back and re-read the article. The actual calculations involved in working with the Riemann hypothesis are too insane for me to even think about, but the whole idea of quantum energy levels corresponding to the sequence of prime numbers is way cool… I didn’t realize before why mathematicans have been so gung-ho on finding new primes…. Sent the link on to me pop, am curious what he has to say about it, when he’s not too busy working on his night surfing light apparatus
Thanks for sharing!