Famed Mathematician Claims Proof of 160-Year-Old Riemann Hypothesis (soylentnews.org)

Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen writes: Sir Michael Atiyah claims to have proved the Riemann hypothesis. This is not some internet crank, but one the towering figures of mathematics in the second half of the 20th century. The thing is, he's almost 90 years old. According to New Scientist, Atiyah is set to present his "simple proof" of the Riemann hypothesis on Monday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany. Atiyah has received two awards often referred to as the Nobel prizes of mathematics, the Fields medal and the Abel Prize; he also served as president of the London Mathematical Society, the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

"[T]he hypothesis is intimately connected to the distribution of prime numbers, those indivisible by any whole number other than themselves and one," reports New Scientist. "If the hypothesis is proven to be correct, mathematicians would be armed with a map to the location of all such prime numbers, a breakthrough with far-reaching repercussions in the field."

Comments

Re: There goes most encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no. Symmetric encryption algorithms have nothing to do with prime numbers, and the asymmetric ones that do (like RSA) aren't going to be any easier to solve just because someone proved the Riemann hypothesis. The RSA problem is prime factorisation, which is something completely different.

Lol

[ledow]

Ironic that Slashdot are now quoting stories from SoylentNews, because they get there first and have better coverage.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's owners not listening to users during the beta fiasco spawned SoylentNews.

"Get woke, go broke" of the new Slashdot owners has maintained and even allowed Soylent to grow.

Re:There goes most encryption

[m.alessandrini]

Actually many theorems on prime numbers rely on the hypothesis that Riemann's conjecture is true. A proof of it would only confirm them.

Here is the paper with the proof

[SmilingBoy]

Here is the paper with the alleged proof:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=17NBICP6OcUSucrXKNWvzLmrQpfUrEKuY

I never took proper mathematics at university so cannot begin to claim to understand any of it, but maybe someone else can.

Re:Here is the paper with the proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the paper [2] he cites everywhere that does all of the heavy lifting in the proof.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPsVhtBQmdgQl25_evlGQ1mmTQE0Ww4a/view

Re:Possible, but unlikely

[Zocalo]

I think it's probably the fittingly named "Enormous Theorem" on Symmetry that took dozens of mathemeticians decades to complete. That runs to over 15,000 pages just for the calculations, and even the "guide" runs to a further 1,200 pages.

Re: There goes most encryption

[ShanghaiBill]

He has now given his talk, and presented his "proof". The overwhelming consensus of qualified mathematicians is that it proves nothing.

Here is a summary of the talk which includes a photo of his proof.