"In 1859 Bernhard Riemann, a shy German mathematician, wrote an eight-page article, giving an answer to a problem that had long puzzled mathematicians. - Although he couldn't provide a proof, Riemann declared that his solution was 'very probably' true. - "For the next one hundred and fifty years, the world's mathematicians have longed for a proof for the Riemann hypothesis. - So great is the interest in its solution that in 2001, an American foundation offered a million-dollar prize to the first person to demonstrate that the hypothesis is correct. - "The Riemann hypothesis refers to prime numbers - a prime being a whole number greater than 1 that cannot be divided by any other whole number except itself and 1. - The hypothesis seeks to explain how prime numbers are distributed among the other numbers. - Mathematicians speak about this mind-bending problem in awed terms and consider it to be even more difficult than Fermat's Last Theorem, which was finally proved by Andrew Wiles six years ago."--BOOK JACKET