A MILLION DOLLAR PRIZE FOR SOLVING A MATH PROBLEM

A MILLION DOLLAR PRIZE FOR SOLVING A MATH PROBLEM
Charles Osgood

Looking for a way to become a millionaire?

"Essentially the Rehman hypothesis says that prime numbers are distributed randomly and you have to prove that statement is true," says Harvard professor Arthur Jaffe.

That's it. If you can settle that classic math conundrum once and for all, you could win a million dollars.

The idea of awarding one million dollars for solutions to a handful of classic mathematical problems has got Jaffe excited. He's also head of the non-profit Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts, which has posted seven Millennium Prize problems on the Internet. He's even written a little verse for the contest.

He says, "Crack one if you can of the seven, that guard classic routes to math heaven, neither canny wisdom nor perfect vision suffice."

Cracking any of the seven unresolved questions will be extremely difficult, some have gone unsolved for a century or more. But Jaffe says just thinking about the problems may yield something worthwhile. "These problems encourage people to look at long range questions which are deep and important and we hope that they'll encourage young people to think about math questions and eventually to go into mathematics."

Money is a great motivator say mathematician Matt Forman who teaches at the University of California-Irvine. "Prizes like this gets attention to mathematics and portrays math as a very vibrant field of study and a world of ideas instead of a cut and dried dusty area."

Math is not pure abstraction. Itâ?Ts part of the world we all live in. It was a monetary prize that inspired Charles Lindbergh to fly solo across the Atlantic. Proving the Rehman hypothesis or any of the other math challenges is like that. Forman says, " It's the intellectual version of exploring a mountain range or landing on the moon, the difference is that the world one is exploring is an intellectual world rather than a physical world. It really is the same level of adventure."

So do the math. You too can be a millionaire.


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