Riemann zeta function

A cute problem goes big

Mathematicians have revived an old approach to solving the famous Riemann hypothesis.

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Infinity or -1/12?

What do you get when you add up all the natural numbers 1+2+3+4+ ... ? Not -1/12! We explore a strange result that has been making the rounds recently.

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The Abel Prize 2013

This year's Abel Prize has been awarded to the Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne for "seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields".

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Career interview: Actor and mathematician
Victoria Gould has always known she would be an actor, and went straight from studying arts at school to running her own theatre company. But she eventually had to come clean about her guilty secret - she loves maths - and has since managed to combine a career as a research mathematician and teacher with a successful acting career on television and in theatre. She tells Plus why she needs to use both sides of her brain.
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A disappearing number
Mathematics takes to the stage with A disappearing number, a work by Complicite, inspired by the mathematical collaboration of Hardy and Ramanujan. Rachel Thomas went to see the play, and explains some of the maths. You can also read her interview with Victoria Gould about how the show was created.
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One L of a discovery
The first third degree transcendental L-function
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Riemann zeta function
The music of the primes
Following on from his article 'The prime number lottery' in last issue of Plus, Marcus du Sautoy continues his exploration of the greatest unsolved problem of mathematics: The Riemann Hypothesis.
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A whirlpool of numbers
The Riemann Hypothesis is probably the hardest unsolved problem in all of mathematics, and one of the most important. It has to do with prime numbers - the building blocks of arithmetic. Nick Mee, together with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, tells us about the patterns hiding inside numbers.
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