place.’
‘Dear, that’s terrible. Are you sure you should be here? Shouldn’t you be at home in bed?’
‘Yes, probably I should. After this, I am going home.’
‘Good. Well, I hope you feel better soon.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘Bye.’
She continued downstairs, not realising she had just saved her own life.
I had a key, so I used it. There was no point in doing anything overtly suspicious in case anyone else should have seen me.
And then I was inside his –
my
– office. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. That was a problem, now: expectation. There were no reference points; everything was
new; the immediate archetype of how things were, at least here.
So: an office.
A static chair behind a static desk. A window with the blinds down. Books filling nearly three of the walls. There was a brown-leaved pot plant on the windowsill, smaller and thirstier than the
one I had seen at the hospital. On the desk there were photos in frames amidst a chaos of papers and unfathomable stationery, and there in the centre of it all was the computer.
I didn’t have long, so I sat down and switched it on. This one seemed only fractionally more advanced than the one I had used back at the house. Earth computers were still very much at the
pre-sentient phase of their evolution, just sitting there and letting you reach in and grab whatever you wanted without even the slightest complaint.
I quickly found what I was looking for. A document called ‘Zeta’.
I opened it up and saw it was twenty-six pages of mathematical symbols. Or most of it was. At the beginning there was a little introduction written in words, which said:
PROOF OF THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS
As you will know the proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. To solve it would revolutionise applications of mathematical
analysis in a myriad of unknowable ways that would transform our lives and those of future generations. Indeed, it is mathematics itself which is the bedrock of civilisation, at first evidenced
by architectural achievements such as the Egyptian pyramids, and by astronomical observations essential to architecture. Since then our mathematical understanding has advanced, but never at a
constant rate.
Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we
would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a
man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made.
Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die.
People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a
religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?
And so today we may be able to say, we have risen a little closer towards our deity. Indeed, potentially we have a chance to turn back the clock and rebuild that ancient library so we can
stand on the shoulders of giants that never were.
Primes
The document carried on in this excited way for a bit longer. I learned a little bit more about Bernhard Riemann, a painfully shy, nineteenth-century German child prodigy who
displayed exceptional skill with numbers from an early age, before succumbing to a mathematical career and a series of nervous breakdowns which plagued his adulthood. I would later discover this
was one of the key problems humans had with numerical understanding – their nervous systems simply
‘Dear, that’s terrible. Are you sure you should be here? Shouldn’t you be at home in bed?’
‘Yes, probably I should. After this, I am going home.’
‘Good. Well, I hope you feel better soon.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘Bye.’
She continued downstairs, not realising she had just saved her own life.
I had a key, so I used it. There was no point in doing anything overtly suspicious in case anyone else should have seen me.
And then I was inside his –
my
– office. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. That was a problem, now: expectation. There were no reference points; everything was
new; the immediate archetype of how things were, at least here.
So: an office.
A static chair behind a static desk. A window with the blinds down. Books filling nearly three of the walls. There was a brown-leaved pot plant on the windowsill, smaller and thirstier than the
one I had seen at the hospital. On the desk there were photos in frames amidst a chaos of papers and unfathomable stationery, and there in the centre of it all was the computer.
I didn’t have long, so I sat down and switched it on. This one seemed only fractionally more advanced than the one I had used back at the house. Earth computers were still very much at the
pre-sentient phase of their evolution, just sitting there and letting you reach in and grab whatever you wanted without even the slightest complaint.
I quickly found what I was looking for. A document called ‘Zeta’.
I opened it up and saw it was twenty-six pages of mathematical symbols. Or most of it was. At the beginning there was a little introduction written in words, which said:
PROOF OF THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS
As you will know the proof of the Riemann hypothesis is the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. To solve it would revolutionise applications of mathematical
analysis in a myriad of unknowable ways that would transform our lives and those of future generations. Indeed, it is mathematics itself which is the bedrock of civilisation, at first evidenced
by architectural achievements such as the Egyptian pyramids, and by astronomical observations essential to architecture. Since then our mathematical understanding has advanced, but never at a
constant rate.
Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we
would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a
man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made.
Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die.
People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a
religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?
And so today we may be able to say, we have risen a little closer towards our deity. Indeed, potentially we have a chance to turn back the clock and rebuild that ancient library so we can
stand on the shoulders of giants that never were.
Primes
The document carried on in this excited way for a bit longer. I learned a little bit more about Bernhard Riemann, a painfully shy, nineteenth-century German child prodigy who
displayed exceptional skill with numbers from an early age, before succumbing to a mathematical career and a series of nervous breakdowns which plagued his adulthood. I would later discover this
was one of the key problems humans had with numerical understanding – their nervous systems simply
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