A Tale of the Primes — Part 1

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On June 8, 2004, Purdue University announced that Louis de Branges de Bourcia, professor of mathematics, had proven the Riemann Hypothesis and solved a great mystery surrounding the prime numbers. Businesses, financial institutes and intelligence agencies round the world were at once alerted to the news.

“There are some mysteries that the human mind will never penetrate,” Leonhard Euler wrote in 1751, “To convince ourselves we have only to cast a glance at tables of primes and we should perceive that there reigns neither order nor rule.”

Euler (1707-1783) had won the Paris Academy Prize 12 times, and is the most prolific mathematical writer of all time. The architects of modern technologies had no doubt in him, devising security mechanisms protecting Internet commerce, bank transactions and intelligence work with prime numbers, confident that these numbers are “mysteries that [the minds of hackers and counterintelligence agencies] will never penetrate.”

Now, it would appear that Euler had been wrong.

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