Dan Rockmore's book: Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis

Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis
Pantheon Books, New York, 2005
Dan Rockmore

As the stakes increase, Prime-Number theory Moves Closer to Proof
Wall Street Journal,Science Journal
Sharon Begley

The Proof: an interview with Dan Rockmore
New Hampshire Public April 12. 2005
John Walters

In 1998 the http://www.msri.org Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California had a three-day conference on Mathematics and the Media. The purpose of this conference was to bring together science writers and mathematicians to discuss ways to better inform the public about mathematics and new discoveries in mathematics. As part of the conference, they asked Peter Sarnak, from Princeton University, to talk about new results in mathematics that he felt the science writers might like to write about. He chose as his topic "The Riemann Hypothesis" This is generally considered the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics and is the major focus of Sarnak's research.

In his talk, Sarnak described some fascinating new connections between the Riemann Hypothesis, physics and random matrices. He used only mathematics that one would meet in calculus and linear algebra. Sarnak's lecture, and a discussion of his talk by the science writers, can be found http://www.msri.org/publications/video/general.html here under"Mathematics for the Media"

With Dan's help we wrote three special editions of Chance News which emphsized the role of probability in current and previous attemps to prove the RH. These special editions of Chance News were also meant to provide readers of Chance News with background information about chance in the primes to allow them to better appreciate Sarnac's very nice talk. Of course, like Sarnac we freely used mathematical formulas. But formulas are apparently not appreciated by the general public.

The WSJ review reports that "He is possibly the only radio math commentator in the US, regularly reading essays on the Vermont Public Radio, illustrating the subject's (mathematics) scope and range through real-life experiences" (As a long time VPR listener I can assure you he is the only one). You can find 29 of these commentaries here. They have jazzy titles like "Math, a love story", Halving Your Cake, The Rare Beuaty of Nine and could lead to interesting discussions in a math class after the students had lisened to one of them

With this book Dan attempts to describe the Prime Number Theorem and its history to the general public without using formulas. He does this by explaining the relevant mathematical concepts in terms of concepts famililer to his readers. For example the exponential function and rate of increase are discussed in terms of the spread of a rumor and the logarithm in terms of the Rickter scale. Density is described ifirst in terms of population density. remarking that the average number of people per square mile living in South Dekota is quite different from that of New Jersey. He then writes:

Similarly, we can ask how many prime numbers "live in the neighboood" of a particular number. Gauss's estimates imply that as we traipse along the number line with basket in hans, picking up primes, we will eventally acquaire them at a rate apporaching the reciprocal of the logarithm of the position that weve just passed.

.Along the way Dan gives a lively discussion of the mathematicians Euler, Gauss, Riemann and many others up to present day mathematicians working on solving the Riemann Hypothesis. He also gives the readers an understanding of what mathematics and mathematial research is all about.