The Riemann hypothesis is a million-dollar math problem hardly anyone is trying to solve | Scientific American
May 19, 2026<br>10 min read<br>Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm<br>The million-dollar math problem hardly anyone is trying to solve
The intimidating legacy of the scariest problem in mathematics
By Joseph Howlett edited by Seth Fletcher<br>DTAN Studio
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In October 2024 I attended a workshop at Harvard University where mathematicians talked through the uses of artificial intelligence in their field. Most were less worried about the future of math than excited about a new tool they might use. During one coffee break, I found myself in a group of participants who all agreed that it made no difference whether a human or a computer solved their favorite open problem. They just wanted to read the proof.<br>“So you really don’t care whether the Riemann hypothesis gets solved by a human or AI?” I asked. I thought I clocked a slight chill, exchanged smirks, knowing looks. It’s not unusual for me to feel a step behind in these circles.<br>“An AI that can prove the Riemann hypothesis is not one I’d want to meet,” said Andrew Sutherland, a number theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If that happens, mathematicians having jobs will be the least of our problems.”<br>On supporting science journalism<br>If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<br>I’d merely been tossing out the name of an open question I’d heard of. But I began to wonder: What is this math puzzle that is so complicated only a truly formidable superintelligence could resolve it?<br>Ever since it was first published, in 1859, Bernhard Riemann’s conjecture about prime numbers has made every list of the most important unsolved mysteries in mathematics. In 1900 mathematician David Hilbert drafted a list of problems to be solved as a blueprint for 20th-century math, and one of them was Riemann’s hypothesis. But at the end of that century the still-open question warranted another wanted poster. In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute promised a million-dollar bounty to anyone who solved the Riemann hypothesis, making it one of its seven “Millennium Problems”—the 21st century’s own aspirational to-do list.<br>The Riemann hypothesis is a claim about a mathematical function so gnarly that for most numbers fed as its inputs, no one knows its exact output. Mathematicians are particularly interested in which numbers will lead to the value of this function being zero. Knowing these inputs would essentially give number theorists superpowers. In an instant they’d gain an unprecedented command of their rawest material, the prime numbers. They would be able to say precisely where all the prime numbers lie along the infinite number line. Turning the hypothesis into a theorem would have sweeping consequences across mathematics, including the math behind cryptography and even nuclear physics.<br>“An AI that can prove the Riemann hypothesis is not one I’d want to meet.” —Andrew Sutherland, M.I.T.
Yet despite the handsome heap of rewards stacked behind it, progress toward the Riemann hypothesis is scarce. There’s no news to share. “The basic status is: nothing is happening, and I don’t really expect anything to happen,” says Alex Kontorovich, a mathematician at Rutgers University. Hardly anyone in the field is even working on it. “I don’t spend too much of my day really thinking about it,” says James Maynard, a mathematician at the University of Oxford. “I just don’t really have any good idea of how to get started.”<br>Why?<br>The Riemann hypothesis has assumed such a central place in mathematics because of the exalted status of prime numbers. “Asking me why number theorists care so much about prime numbers is kind of like asking why physicists care so much about forces,” says Brian Conrad, a mathematician at Stanford University, perhaps with a tinge of offense.<br>This obsession goes back thousands of years, to the beginnings of math itself—which, of course, started with counting. The ancient Greeks, for example, held whole numbers as paramount. They studied how to combine them to produce other quantities. You can construct a set of 15 stones by counting three at a time, for instance. But some numbers can’t be...