Professor Faltings' Notes

Three years to solve the Riemann hypothesis…

Countless people have said similar words.

Faltings could recall at least a dozen people claiming the same thing.

One of them had even passed away.

That person was called Weil, the person who proposed the famous Weil's conjecture.

Apparently, in his younger years, he tried to challenge the "zero-point distribution of the ζ function for algebraic curves over a finite field" problem, which in turn created the Weil's conjecture. He optimistically thought that this might be true for the real Riemann's conjecture as well.

He even made a plan, that if he found the proof of Riemann's conjecture, he would deliberately postpone the publication of his thesis to the outside world until 1959… which was the 100th anniversary of the Riemann hypothesis.

However, his optimism soon disappeared.