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[dusty2229]

 [Puzzle] Silver #238 Riemann

[Flidget Jerome]

Is that asking us to solve what I think it's asking us to solve? It looks pretty straight forward, but also insane.

[cassandra]

And exactly how many Perplex City points is this one worth?

[dusty2229]

Not quite sure what this is asking us to do
BTW it's worth a mere 60 points

[Flidget Jerome]

And all I can think is "Take that, Where.gif!"

[JebJoya]

WHAT THEflippity floo?!

I joked about this being a card on IRC last night. This is being researched by hundereds of mathematicians all over the world, for a good popular science (readable maths) book on it, try "Dr. Riemann's Zeros" by Karl Sabbagh.

Right, for some more detail:

sum to infinity (1/n^s)

so 1/(1^s) + 1/(2^s) +....

n^s = n^(p+qi) = (n^p)(n^qi)

= (n^p) * (e^ (qi*ln(n)))

and then to take 1/(n^s) = n^(-s)

= (n^-p) * (e^(-qi*ln(n)))

so we've got to find the sum (n->inf) of the above equation, and prove that this can only equal 0 if p=(1/2) (that's minus a couple of special cases, i believe...)

of course, here we have re^(i*theta), which creates a vector in an argand diagram, which of course you can add to by adding nose to tail of the vectors. The length of the vector is (n^-p), and the direction of the vector is (-qi*ln(n)) radians.

That's some junk to look at

Jeb

EDIT - uhhhh, changed two words so that they weren't quite as glaringly... swearlike... - SG

[erekose]

WOW!

Thats a puzzle, and it's hard to think how they're going to make one harder than that. Tempting to try to solve though...

(erekose puts puzzle on list of things to do, right after 'formulate Unified Field Theory')

On second thought, given this puzzle, asking us to solve the holy grail of physics would be easy.

[tanner]

as whoever solves this is gonna be very very famous (and rich) i assume the puzzle is something else

[BrianEnigma]

My thought (which has not led to much of anything), was what if the puzzle is something different on the card, but still related to prime numbers? For instance, what if you took the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc. letters or words from the text and it formed a different question? Or words with a prime number of letters?

If you look again, you will note that everything on the card is a statement. There is no question. The fact that the Millennium Prize is offered is, again, a statement. There is nothing asking you to solve, explain, prove, or disprove anything. I am of the thinking that there is a question hidden in there somewhere, if we can figure out how to unlock it.

[Reason]

[JebJoya]

Sent a text, awaiting reply...

Jeb

[BrianEnigma]

Going through the words and assigning them positional values gets a little tricky because of things like the "G.F.G." before Riemann. Is that abbreviation supposed to be three words, one word, or skipped? At any rate, I took four different looks at this puzzle, two by counting through words and two by counting through letters.

In one instance, I am taking every prime position (word 2, 3, 5: "numbers are that"). In the other instance, I am skipping a prime number of positions, then taking the value (skipping 2 to "numbers," skipping 3 more to "that," skipping 5 more to "any"). Here are my results. They don't look too promising.

Words, based on prime positions:

[yanka]

Ok, I have just found out that "tretretretre" is actually a word

Um, anyway... Since there is no question posed, what if this is asking for something stupidly simple - like a number of "things" on the back of the card? For example, there are 26.5 trees, 9 brown houses and 7 white houses... woo, a prime Ugh... Yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this...

[tanner]

how about the solve being

[dusty2229]

Point of interest: The card gives Riemann's initials as G.F.G. when in fact they are G.F.B. (Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann ). Don't know if this is relevant at all.