Wednesday, June 19, 2013

100 cae of lies

he read everything he coud about the attemps to find a formula to predict the primes . the gniuses of mathematics , the smartest people who ev some had lived long , quite lives . but many who flirted with the primes hd fallen while very young : gauseer lived , had tried to understand the primes , and been defeated
, who left math  forever in his  twenties ; ramanujan , the vegetariaqn brahmin who died at thirty -two ; godel , who starved himself  to death ; nash , teetering on the edge of the void most of his life '  grothendieck , still aklive , doistered inb a hut in the pyrenees , obsessed with the devil  ; turing who killed himself at forty -one by eating a cyanide laced apple .
and the greatest of them all , in elliot'sw mind at least . bernhard riemann , who died in italy at thirty  nine .because of pleurisy , the books said , but elliot figured he had died because  the heat in him had died , riemann had simply gone as far as he could . he  ha found a possible order in the primes and given  the world  a direction in the riemann hypothesis . it made sense to die then .
" the distribution of primes is linked to a mistake about what zero and actually are ," he told his parents at dinner one day ." zero and are the same point . they are definitely not numbers ."
"prove it ," his father said .
"i will , i am going to be a mathrematician ."
"of course you are ." his father said ." but you have to study hard so you  can go to a great  university ."
\elliot scored a petfect 800  on his math SAT s , but only 710on the verbal side .

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