In August 1859, a 32-year-old, timid, bashful, sensitive, diffident soul, with a horror for speaking in public, was presenting a paper to the Berlin Academy about the density of prime numbers on the real line. The brilliant mathematician giving the historic lecture was Bernhard Riemann, and in the course of the talk he made an incidental remark, which to this day has remained an enigma, known as the Riemann hypothesis. The hypothesis simply states that Riemann zeta function, an elegantly expressed analytic function, has all the complex zeros on a vertical line in the complex plane.

 

The lyrics you hear in this podcast is by Professor Tom Apostol and the poem is about Riemann Hypothesis.

 

Disclaimer: My singing is not in tune with “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and my grandchildren say that my rendering of the song is terrifying.