A Hyderabad-based math wizard, Dr Kumar Eswaran, has claimed to have solved the 161-year-old Riemann Hypothesis, as per media reports.
The Riemann Hypothesis, which is considered as one of the biggest problems to baffle mathematicians across the world and was designated as a millennium problem in 2000, with a reward of $1 million from Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, has finally been solved, Dr Easwaran said, who works at the Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology, Hyderabad.
In an interview with Deccan Chronicle, Easwaran said, “It was in 2016 that I first gave the proof for the formula improved by the great mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann in the 1800s. I had put it on the web for open review and downloads after working on it for about 6 weeks. During 2018-2019, I also gave lectures on the proof solving the Hypothesis.”
What is Riemann Hypothesis?
In its simple possible explanation, the Riemann Hypothesis concerns how prime numbers are distributed. This problem has racked mathematicians for years now. According to the math geniuses who have wrestled with the hypothesis, the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis has extensive consequences for the number theory and for the use of primes in cryptography, and would also provide proof to a wide array of theorems that are dependent on the truth of this hypothesis.
According to Eswaran, it is a cakewalk to count prime numbers from 1 to 10, but the same becomes a herculean task when calculating the prime numbers for big figures like one million or 10 billion and more. The proof to the Riemann Hypothesis enables mathematicians to exactly count the prime numbers.
The methodology used by Dr Easwaran showed the ‘factorisation sequence of numbers’ like a ‘random walk’. “This method used was actually not just number theories. I had to use techniques from random variables and probability as well,” Dr Eswaran added.
Conclusion of the committee that reviewed Dr Easwaran’s proof of the RH
An expert committee of scientists which included Dr T. Ramasami, former secretary, Union ministry of science and technology, Prof. P. Narasimha Reddy, executive director, Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology, Prof. M. Seetharaman, former professor and chair, department of theoretical physics, University of Madras, Prof. V. Srinivasan, former professor and dean, School of Physics, UoH, Prof. K. Srinivasa Rao, former senior professor, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, Prof. M. D. Srinivas, Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Studies, Prof. Vinayak Eswaran, department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, IIT Hyderabad, and Dr Adindla Suma, associate professor, department of computer science, Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology, carried out an open review of the proof for a year from February 2020 to conclude that Dr Easwaran has indeed proved the Riemann Hypothesis.
More than 1,200 mathematicians were invited by the committee to take part in the open review of the proof presented by Dr Easwaran. The review was open in the sense that the referees would willingly have their names and institutional affiliations revealed in an open manner. This was important so that nothing is done anonymously, and nothing can be said that would not be available for all other experts to see.
After examining the comments of the seven reviewers and the responses of the author, the committee concluded that Dr Easwaran’s proof of the RH is correct. The committee also ruled that the proof, the referees’ comments, and the author’s responses in their entirety, without any redactions, be published in the form of an e-book and made available to the public at large. It also said that a hard copy of the book should be made available in the market.
