Prove The Riemann Hypothesis And Make.Money.Fast

waimate writes: "The Riemann hypothesis is all about the fundamental nature of those mysterious individuals, prime numbers. Proving it will have ramifications for quantum mechanics and improve our understanding of the nature of the universe, but more importantly will now win you one million dollars. With that kinda money, who cares who's the president." I'm afraid this article loses me about halfway through, but it looks interesting. Any mathematicians in the audience want to take a crack at explaining the second half of the article? :)

Comments

*Another* prize -- anyone wokring on an index?

[Kris_J]

Cheap access to space, X-prize, this -- there appear to be quite a number of high dollar value science prizes out there. Is anyone working on a list of these prizes anywhere on the 'Net. Even better would be a list of groups trying to win them. I think I'd like to be part of something like that...

Interesting Situation Indeed!

[Mad Hughagi]

Up until this point I figured that the zeta function was just another one of those 'rarely used' functions in the back of my math tables!

In essence, the point of the second half of the article shows how current research in quantum mechanics can be applied to give a sound reasoning to the fact that the zeta function produces these 'zeros' in the complex plane.

Connes has proposed that if one could construct a particular quantum system it may very well have energies (remember that in quantum mechanics energy levels are discrete - not continuous!) that correspond to these zeros produced by the zeta function. For this to be truly groundbreaking however the quantum system would have to display all of the energy levels corresponding to the zeros but it would have to not have extra energy levels. I don't know how to go much further into the development of a quantum state space based on prime numbers, however. Perhaps someone more well versed in QM could explain that.

The true beauty of this proof is that it would give prime numbers an actual physical significance. Like it says in the article this could result in greatly expanding our ability to deal with many complex phenomena on the quantum scale and give us insights into many other phenomena. I for one am going to be following this one as close as possible!