Gowers, W. T. (October 2003), "Prime time for mathematics (review of Prime Obsession and The Music of the Primes)", Nature, 425 (6958): 562, doi: 10.1038/425562a

The Music of the Primes - Wikipedia

La idea central del libro es la de si los primos siguen un patrón o la naturaleza los elige de manera aleatoria. Riemann conjeturó con una función específica (la función zeta) que los ceros que producía esta función sí tienen que seguir un orden lógico. Su conjetura es uno de los veintitrés problemas que propuso Hilbert en un congreso en la Sorbona en el año 1900. Esta hipótesis sigue eludiendo una demostración válida, y su búsqueda es la que cuenta este libro.In 1859, the brilliant German mathematician Bernard Riemann put forward an idea which finally seemed to reveal a magical harmony at work in the numerical landscape. The promise that these eternal, unchanging numbers would finally reveal their secret thrilled mathematicians around the world. Yet Riemann, a hypochondriac and a troubled perfectionist, never publicly provided a proof for his hypothesis and his housekeeper burnt all his personal papers on his death. Heawood, Jonathan (August 23, 2003), "Million dollar question: Marcus du Sautoy tries to explain why an unsolved mathematical conundrum matters in The Music of the Primes", The Guardian

music of the primes - maths The music of the primes - maths

Riemann had found one very special imaginary landscape, generated by something called the zeta function, which he discovered held the secret to prime numbers. In particular, the points at sea-level in the landscape could be used to produce these special harmonic waves which changed Gauss's graph into the genuine staircase of the primes. Riemann used the coordinates of each point at

Riemann's Symphony

Hoffman, Jascha (April–May 2004), "Prime time (review of Prime Obsession, The Riemann Hypothesis, and The Music of the Primes)", Boston Review He sets himself quite a task, though. The Music of the Primes is about the search for a formula which will enable mathematicians to understand the distribution of prime numbers. Primes, you will remember, are those numbers divisible only by one and themselves - 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, etc... - although it's not as simple as that 'etcetera' might suggest. While other number sequences continue in predictable ways, primes can still only be located through a laborious process of trial and error. There is no formula for finding the six billionth prime, for instance, although a computer, going through all the other numbers on the way, will get there eventually. The highest prime yet discovered is a number with more than four million digits. Baylis, John (July 2005), "Review of The Music of the Primes", The Mathematical Gazette, 89 (515): 348–351, doi: 10.1017/s0025557200178143, JSTOR 3621272, S2CID 164989727 I think it’s really easy as a young mathematician to decide you only like one side of maths and neglect the other but school maths does not give you enough to go on. I think it’s important to keep an open mind and this book helped me appreciate applied maths when I read it in Year 12. Before then I immaturely decided I would specialise in pure maths without really considering what applied maths would be like at university. Should you read this? I would say, yes. If you’re interested in the history of maths/science in general (on the basis of a prominent example), I guess it’s hard to come by a presentation that is more simple but has the same high level of seriousness, fun, and sophistication.