Just got back into town after a three-week vacation, and among other things, I've been catching up on my reading. The 27 November issue of Science has an interesting news item about the above subject. Here is the abstract: --- MATHEMATICS: >From Solitaire, a Clue to the World of Prime Numbers Dana Mackenzie Participants at an October workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, learned that a team of mathematicians has proved a deep similarity between a simple form of solitaire and a mathematical tool called random matrices, originally developed to understand the quantum behavior of large atoms. The implications could go well beyond card games to some of the most puzzling patterns in mathematics. Other recent work suggests that the same random matrix key might unlock the most important problem in number theory: proving the Riemann hypothesis, which describes how prime numbers are distributed among other integers. Copyright ) 1998 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. --- A proof of the RH would be at least as noteworthy as that of Fermat's last theorem, and certainly would have much broader practical utility. I only subscribe to the paper version of the magazine, but perhaps one of our readers who gets the online version can obtain reprint permission for the full-text article so it can be posted to this list. Happy new year, -Ernst
