Clay’s seven million dollars is not the first time that money has been offered for solutions to mathematical problems. In 1997 Wiles picked up 75,000 Deutschmarks for his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, thanks to a prize offered in 1908 by Paul Wolfskehl. The story of the Wolfskehl Prize is what had brought Fermat to Wiles’s attention at the impressionable age of ten. Clay believes that if he can do the same for the Riemann Hypothesis, it will be a million dollars well spent. More recently, two publishing houses, Faber & Faber in the UK and Bloomsbury in the USA, offered a million dollars for a proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture as a publicity stunt to launch their publication of Apostolos Doxiadis’s novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture. To earn the money you had to explain why every even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. However, the publishers didn’t give you much time to crack it. The solution had to be submitted before midnight on March 15, 2002, and was bizarrely open only to US and UK residents.
Clay believes that mathematicians receive little reward or recognition for their labours. For example, there is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics that they can aspire to. Instead, the award of a Fields Medal is considered the ultimate prize in the mathematical world. In contrast to Nobel prizes, which tend to be awarded to scientists at the end of their careers for achievements long past, Fields Medals are restricted to mathematicians below the age of forty. This is not because of the generally held belief that mathematicians burn out at an early age. John Fields, who conceived of the idea and provided funds for the prize, wanted its award to spur on the most promising mathematicians to even greater achievements. The medals are awarded every four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians. The first ones were awarded in Oslo in 1936.
The age limit is strictly adhered to. Despite Andrew Wiles’s extraordinary achievement in proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Fields Medal committee weren’t able to award him a medal at the Congress in Berlin in 1998, the first opportunity after the final proof was accepted, for he was born in 1953. They did have a special medal struck to honour Wiles’s achievement. But it still does not compare to being a member of the illustrious club of Fields Medal winners. The recipients include many of the key players in our drama: Enrico Bombieri, Alain Connes, Atle Selberg, Paul Cohen, Alexandre Grothendieck, Alan Baker, Pierre Deligne. Those names account for nearly a fifth of the medals ever awarded.
But it is not for the money that mathematicians aspire to these medals. In contrast to the big bucks behind the Nobel prizes, the purse that accompanies a Fields Medal contains a modest 15,000 Canadian dollars. So Clay’s millions will help compete with the monetary kudos of the Nobel prizes. In contrast to Fields Medals and the Faber—Bloomsbury Goldbach prize, the money is there regardless of age or nationality, and with no time limits for a solution, except for the ticking clock of inflation.
However, the greatest incentive for the mathematician chasing one of the Millennium problems is not the monetary reward but the intoxicating prospect of the immortality that mathematics can bestow. Solving one of Clay’s problems may earn you a million dollars, but that is nothing compared with carving your name on civilisation’s intellectual map. The Riemann Hypothesis, Fermat’s Last Theorem, Goldbach’s Conjecture, Hilbert space, the Ramanujan tau function, Euclid’s algorithm, the Hardy—Littlewood Circle Method, Fourier series, Gödel numbering, a Siegel zero, the Selberg trace formula, the sieve of Eratosthenes, Mersenne primes, the Euler product, Gaussian integers – these discoveries have all immortalised the mathematicians who have been responsible for unearthing these treasures in our exploration of the primes. Those names will live on long after we have forgotten the likes of Aeschylus, Goethe and Shakespeare. As G.H. Hardy explained, ‘languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.’
Those mathematicians who have laboured long and hard on this epic journey to understand the primes are more than just names set in mathematical stone. The twists and turns that the story of the primes has taken are the products of real lives, of a dramatis personae rich and varied. Historical figures from the French revolution and friends of Napoleon give way to modern-day magicians and Internet entrepreneurs. The stories of a clerk from India, a French spy spared execution and a Jewish Hungarian fleeing the persecution of Nazi Germany are bound together by an obsession with the primes. All these characters bring a unique perspective in their attempt to add their name to the mathematical roll call. The primes have united mathematicians across many national boundaries: China, France, Greece, America, Norway, Australia, Russia, India and Germany are just a few of the countries from which have come prominent members of the nomadic tribe of mathematicians. Every four years they converge to tell the stories of their travels at an International Congress.
It is not only the desire to leave a footprint in the past which motivates the mathematician. Just as Hilbert dared to look forward into the unknown, a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis would be the start of a new journey. When Wiles addressed the press conference at the announcement of the Clay prizes he was keen to stress that the problems are not the final destination:
There is a whole new world of mathematics out there, waiting to be discovered. Imagine if you will, the Europeans in 1600. They know that across the Atlantic there is a New World. How would they have assigned prizes to aid in the discovery and development of the United States? Not a prize for inventing the airplane, not a prize for inventing the computer, not a prize for founding Chicago, not a prize for machines that would harvest areas of wheat. These things have become a part of America, but such things could not have been imagined in 1600. No, they would have given a prize for solving such problems as the problem of longitude.
The Riemann Hypothesis is the longitude of mathematics. A solution to the Riemann Hypothesis offers the prospect of charting the misty waters of the vast ocean of numbers. It represents just a beginning in our understanding of Nature’s numbers. If we can only find the secret of how to navigate the primes, who knows what else lies out there, waiting for us to discover?
When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question? Enrico Bombieri, ‘Prime Territory’ in The Sciences
Two centuries before Bombieri’s April Fool had teased the mathematical world, equally exciting news was being trumpeted from Palermo by another Italian, Giuseppe Piazzi. From his observatory Piazzi had detected a new planet that orbited the Sun somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Christened Ceres, it was much smaller than the seven major planets then known, but its discovery on January 1, 1801, was regarded by everyone as a great omen for the future of science in the new century.
Excitement turned to despair a few weeks later as the small planet disappeared from view as its orbit took it around the other side of the Sun, where its feeble light was drowned out by the Sun’s glare. It was now lost to the night sky, hidden once again amongst the plethora of stars in the firmament. Nineteenth-century astronomers lacked the mathematical tools for calculating its complete path from the short trajectory they had been able to track during the first few weeks of the new century. It seemed that they had lost the planet and had no way of predicting where it would next appear.
However, nearly a year after Piazzi’s planet had vanished, a twenty-four-year-old German from Brunswick announced that he knew where astronomers should find the missing object. With no alternative prediction to hand, astronomers aimed their telescopes