Math & Cultural

Dr. Barry Mazur, Gerhard Gade University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, gave a talk on Primes, based on his book-in-progress with William Stein on the Riemann Hypothesis. 

Friday, April 25, 2014

11:00 am - 12:00 noon

Simons Auditorium at MSRI

How you would tell a high-school student or an interested lay person about the Riemann Hypothesis?

From the Introduction to the Book by Mazur and Stein (available at http://modular.math.washington.edu/rh/):

The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the great unsolved problems of mathematics and the reward of $1,000,000 of Clay Mathematics Institute prize money awaits the person who solves it. But-with or without money, its resolution is crucial for our understanding of the nature of numbers.

There are at least four full-length books recently published, written for a general audience, that have the Riemann Hypothesis as their main topic. A reader of these books will get a fairly rich picture of the personalities engaged in the pursuit, and of related mathematical and historical issues.

This is not the mission of the book that you now have before you. We aim-instead-to explain, in as direct a manner as possible and with the least mathematical background required, what this problem is all about and why it is so important.

VIDEO POSTING:

The talk was also heard at Harvard: it was transmitted by FORA.tv to the Harvard Friends of Mathematics, which met that day.