A MATHS hobbyist has beaten an international computer network in a race to test the Riemann hypothesis, an important mathematical conjecture about prime numbers that has remained unproven for almost 150 years.
The hypothesis says that the prime numbers are distributed randomly along the number line, rather than following any pattern. But although it was put forward in 1859 and now underpins many other theories, despite a $1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no one has yet been able to prove it.
Instead of trying to prove the hypothesis, Stephen Wedeniwski, a computer scientist…
