On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 08:52:39PM -0600, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> "The whole of e-commerce depends on prime numbers. I have described the
> primes as atoms: what mathematicians are missing is a kind of mathematical
> prime spectrometer. Chemists have a machine that, if you give it a
> molecule, will tell you the atoms that it is built from. Mathematicians
> haven't invented a mathematical version of this. That is what we are after.
> If the Riemann hypothesis is true, it won't produce a prime number
> spectrometer. But the proof should give us more understanding of how the
> primes work, and therefore the proof might be translated into something
> that might produce this prime spectrometer. If it does, it will bring the
> whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight. So there are very big
> implications."
>
I bet the reporter had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find someone
willing to make this claim. Nice for making a sensational article, but
otherwise entirely worthless.
Whether the proof is complete/correct or not, the gist of it seems to be
a construction of a Hilbert-space of entire functions in whose context
the zeta function, suitably transformed so that the critical line is
mapped onto the reals, becomes a self-adjoint operator. To go from
this to the reported claim is at least premature and likely ludicrous.
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