Researchers have made what might be new headway toward a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, one of the most impenetrable problems in mathematics. The hypothesis, proposed 160 years ago, could help unravel the mysteries of prime numbers.
Mathematicians made the advance by tackling a related question about a group of expressions known as Jensen polynomials, they report May 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the conjecture is so difficult to verify that even this progress is not necessarily a sign that a solution is near (SN Online: 9/25/18).