Re:Riemman was wrong? (Score 1)

It's not a question of simplicity. It takes several pages of symbolic logic just to prove 1 + 1 = 2. Mathematicians have been trying to prove RH for about 150 years. Fermat's Last Theorem took twice that to prove, despite being MUCH simpler, and the proof required mathematical tools which didn't even exist in Fermat's day. Plus if RH isn't true, virtually the whole of mathematics comes crashing down about our ears, because there are several critical parts of it which can't be true if RH isn't! Someone mentioned encryption and factorisation of prime numbers, but I think they misunderstood what they've read about RH. The problem with trying to crack encryption lies in trying to determine which prime numbers were used to encrypt the message; prime numbers are hard to generate and verify because as yet there does not exist any method other than brute force to determine if a given number even IS prime, i.e. you have to divide it by all prime numbers smaller than its square root. When you're talking about 60-digit primes, the number of possibilities for public and private key pairs is...well, I don't know what it is offhand, but it's bloody large! But proving RH would indirectly give mathematicians a method of deriving primes WITHOUT checking for possible factors - if RH is true and the given number lies on the critical line, then it's prime. Generating primes would then be a simple matter of plugging the right values into the Riemann zeta function. So untold trillions of years of work with a supercomputer are reduced to maybe a few hours with a PC. Which means public key encryption will be rendered useless once RH is proved. Not that the mathematicians will care about that! :)