Stalking the riemann hypothesis

Includes index

Includes bibliography (p. 277-278) and references

1 Prologue-it all begins with zero
2 The god-given natural numbers
3 The shape of the primes
4 Primal cartographers
5 Shoulders to stand upon
6 Riemann and his "very likely" hypothesis
7 A Dutch red herring
8 A prime number theorem, after all
and more
9 Good, but not good enough
10 First steps
11 A chance meeting of two minds
12 God created the natural numbers
but, in a billiard hall?
13 Making order out of (quantum) chaos
14 God may not play dice, but what about cards?
15 The millennium meeting

In 1859 a German professor named Bernhard Riemann postulated a law capable of describing with an amazing degree of accuracy the baffling occurrence of prime numbers; coming up with its proof has been the holy grail of mathematicians ever since. In Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis, Dan Rockmore, a prominent mathematician in his own right, takes us from Euclid's pondering of the infinitude of the primes through modern efforts to prove the Riemann hypothesis - efforts that astonishingly connect the primes to the statistics of solitaire, chaos theory, and even the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Along the way, he introduces us to the many brilliant and fascinating thinkers who have contributed to this work, from the most famous mathematician of all time, Carl Friedrich Gauss (Riemann's teacher), to the intellectual giants David Hilbert and Freeman Dyson.