Sir Michael Atiyah, 89, is a British-Lebanese mathematician. He grew up in Sudan and Egypt but spent most of his academic life at University of Oxford and University of Cambridge (UK), and at the Institute for Advanced Study (US). He was President of the London Mathematical Society (1974–1976), President of the Royal Society (1990–1995), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1990–1997), Chancellor of the University of Leicester (1995–2005), and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2005–2008). He has been an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh since 1997. His awards include the Fields Medal (1966) and the Abel Prize (2004), which are top awards in mathematics. Last month, he claimed to have found a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is one of the seven US$1 million Millenium Prize Problems and widely considered the most important problem in mathematics. For a complex number s, the Riemann zeta function at s, denoted by ζ(s), is the infinite sum 1/(1s) + 1/(2s) + 1/(3s) + ... The Did You Know section features ζ(2). The conjecture, proposed by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, is that ζ(s) = 0 only if s is a negative even integer or a complex number with real part 1/2. It implies results about the distribution of prime numbers. Atiyah’s full argument still needs to be provided and withstand the scrutiny of the mathematics community. His claim has met scepticism. Irrespective of whether the argument is watertight or not, Atiyah is very likely to offer new insights.

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