8/1/2003
Riemann Hypothesis
2
Prologue
In August
1859, a 32-year-old, timid, bashful, sensitive, diffident soul, with a horror for speaking
in public, was presenting
a paper to the Berlin Academy about the density of prime numbers on the real line. The
brilliant mathematician giving the historic lecture was Bernhard Riemann, and in the course of the talk he made an incidental
remark, which to this day
has remained an enigma, known as the Riemann hypothesis. The hypothesis simply states
that Riemann zeta function,
an elegantly expressed analytic function, has all the complex zeros on a vertical line in the
complex plane.
