"On April 7, 1997, a sensational piece of news flashed across the computer screens of the entire world mathematical community.


 The website of the International Congress to be held the following year in Berlin announced that the Holy Grail of mathematics had finally been claimed. Someone had proved the Riemann Hypothesis.


That news was destined to have profound effects. The Riemann Hypothesis is a central problem for all of mathematics.


As they read their e-mail, mathematicians were buzzing with excitement at the prospect of understanding one of the greatest mysteries of mathematics.


The announcement came in a letter from Professor Enrico Bombieri. You couldn't have asked for a better, more esteemed source. Bombieri is one of the custodians of the Riemann Hypothesis and resides at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which has already hosted Einstein and Gödel. He speaks very softly, but mathematicians listen to everything he has to say. [...]


"There are some fantastic developments at the lecture Alain Connes gave at the Institute for Advanced Study last Wednesday," Bombieri began in the email. [...] He went on to explain how a young physicist attending the lecture had "in a flash" seen a way to use his bizarre world of "supersymmetric fermionic-bosonic systems" to attack the Riemann Hypothesis.


Not many mathematicians knew what this cocktail of technical terms had recently become popular among particle physicists meant, but Bombieri explained that it described "the physics corresponding to a statistical ensemble very close to absolute zero of a mixture of anyons and morons with opposite spins."


The matter still sounded rather obscure, but it was the solution to the most difficult problem in the history of mathematics, so no one expected it to be easy. According to Bombieri, after six days of nonstop work and with the help of a new programming language called MISPAR, the young physicist had finally cracked mathematics’s most intractable problem.


Bombieri concluded his email with the words: “Wow! Please spread the word about this.”


As extraordinary as it was that a young physicist had finally proved the Riemann Hypothesis, the news was not all that surprising. Mathematics and physics had often been tangled up together in the past few decades. Although the Riemann Hypothesis was a problem that had number theory at its core, it had been showing unexpected resonances with some problems in particle physics for a few years.


Mathematicians were preparing to change their travel plans to fly to Princeton to share the moment. [...]


It wasn’t just mathematicians who were excited by Bombieri’s announcement. Would this solution to the Riemann Hypothesis cause a crash in e-commerce? NSA agents were sent to Princeton to find out. But as mathematicians and electronic counterintelligence agents flocked to Princeton, many people began to smell something fishy in Bombieri's email.


It's true that elementary particles have been given some crazy names: gluons, csi hyperons, enchanted mesons, quarks, the latter courtesy of James Joyce. But "morons"? Certainly not!


Bombieri has an unrivaled reputation for knowing every detail of the Riemann Hypothesis, but those who know him personally also know that he has a wicked sense of humor. [...]


With Bombieri's email, the mathematical community had been fooled. Eager to relive the excitement that had been sparked a few years earlier by the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, mathematicians had jumped on Bombieri's bait. And the pleasure of forwarding that email meant that, as it spread rapidly, the date of April 1st disappeared from the original source. Add to that the fact that the email was read in countries where the concept of April Fools' Day did not exist, and it becomes clear why the prank was much more successful than its author could have imagined.


Eventually Bombieri had to confess that his email was a joke.


As the 21st century approached, we remained completely in the dark about the nature of the most fundamental numbers in mathematics. It was the prime numbers that had the last laugh."

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