0Sir Michael Atiyah, the president of London Mathematical Society along with the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh is one of the most recognizable modern mathematicians. At a lecture on Monday, he pointed out how to how to solve the Riemann hypothesis, which has stood strongly for 160 years.

The lecture happened at the Heidelberg Laureate in Germany last Monday. Sir Atiyah took this chance to show the world of maths how he came to say that he found out how to solve the hypothesis. However, the solution has to be confirmed by other elite mathematicians and published before he can claim the Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge or CMI. The prize is said to be $1 million worth.

How has this hypothesis been solved?

The Riemann hypothesis was initially brought about by Bernhard Riemann in 1859.

Its goal is to solve an older problem with prime numbers. (Prime numbers are numbers which are only divided by themselves and the number 1). Riemann said that the distribution of prime numbers is not unpredictable but follow a certain way described by an equation named the Riemann zeta function.

So, in order to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the mathematician needs to figure out how to predict the occurrence of every prime number. What makes it even more complicated is that prime numbers have been seen as they distribute totally random.

Until recently, only 10,000,000,000,000 (ten thousand billion) prime numbers have been proved to be consistent with the equation, but we don’t know yet if all of them are.

Atiyah, however, claimed that he has found a “radically new approach” to explain that the equation can be applied exactly to all prime numbers.

Atiyah also added at the lecture that older works from Neumann and Hirzebruch have supported him during the progress to find out the solution.

Here is a quote by Keith Devlin in 1998:

Nothing new has been announced by CMI yet.

>>> Indian Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan And His Famous Quotes