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Legacy hunting Date: Sent Tuesday, November 4, 2003 Category: None

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On thinking ahead, from the novel "Artifact" by Greg Benford, a "hard" sci-fi writer who is also a physicist:

"There was a great mathematician named Hilbert, who telegraphed Berlin saying he had proved the outstanding unsolved problem in mathematics, a thing called Riemann's conjecture. It has to do with the roots of a well known function.

He sends this telegram to Berlin, where he's going to give a speech. Everybody gets excited. So Hilbert shows up and talks, and says nothing about the problem.

Somebody comes up to him after the speech and says, what about Riemann's conjecture, what's the solution?

Hilbert says he hasn't got one. He was taking his first airplane trip to Berlin, and was pretty nervous, so he sent the telegram in case he got killed."

Received from Leon Taylor.