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Bernhard Riemann 1826 - 1866 by David F. Coppedge Let’s turn now to another remarkable Christian mathematician who, like Blaise Pascal, changed the world but never reached his 40th birthday: Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (pronounced REE-mon). Mathematics is the language of science and the two are almost useless without one another. There are textbooks both in mathematical physics and physical mathematics. Sometimes the scientist presses the mathematician to produce better tools for computation, but sometimes the mathematician opens up new vistas for the scientist to explore. Riemann was such a man. He liberated mathematics from the strictures of Euclidean geometry...

“What he showed in the presentation is very unlikely to be anything like a proof of the Riemann hypothesis as we know it,” says Jørgen Veisdal, an economist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who has previously studied the Riemann hypothesis. “It is simply too vague and unspecific.” Veisdal added that he would need to examine the written proof more closely to make a definitive judgement. The Riemann hypothesis, one of the last great unsolved problems in math, was first proposed in 1859 by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It is a supposition about prime numbers, such...

The 22 million digit number and the amazing maths behind primes January 21, 2016 by Steve Humble, The Conversation Primes: here be magic. Credit: Shutterstock It is a quite extraordinary figure. Dr Curtis Cooper from the University of Central Missouri has found the largest-known prime number - written (274207281)-1. It is around 22m digits long and, if printed in full, would take you days to read. Its discovery comes thanks to a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) to search for primes. A number which can only be divided by...

In their search for patterns, mathematicians have uncovered unlikely connections between prime numbers and quantum physics. Will the subatomic world help reveal the elusive nature of the primes?In 1972, the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an article called "Missed Opportunities." In it, he describes how relativity could have been discovered many years before Einstein announced his findings if mathematicians in places like Göttingen had spoken to physicists who were poring over Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetism. The ingredients were there in 1865 to make the breakthrough—only announced by Einstein some 40 years later. It is striking that Dyson should have written about...