In... 1859 Bernhard Riemann... presented a paper to the [Berlin] Academy... "On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quanitity." ...Riemann tackled the problem with the most sophisticated mathematics of his time... inventing for his purposes a mathematical object of great power and subtlety. ...[H]e made a guess about that object, and then remarked:One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this, but I have put aside the search for such a proof after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective...That ... guess lay almost unnoticed for decades. Then... gradually seized... imaginations... until it attained the status of an overwhelming obsession. ...The Riemann Hypothesis... remained an obsession all through the twentieth century and remains one today, having resisted every attempt at proof and disproof. [It is] now the great white whale of mathematical research.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In... 1859 Bernhard Riemann... presented a paper to the [Berlin] Academy... "On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quanitity." ...Riemann tackled the problem with the most sophisticated mathematics of his time... inventing for his purposes a mathematical object of great power and subtlety. ...[H]e made a guess about that object, and then remarked:One would of course like to have a rigorous proof of this, but I have put aside the search for such a proof after some fleeting vain attempts because it is not necessary for the immediate objective...That ... guess lay almost unnoticed for decades. Then... gradually seized... imaginations... until it attained the status of an overwhelming obsession. ...The Riemann Hypothesis... remained an obsession all through the twentieth century and remains one today, having resisted every attempt at proof and disproof. [It is] now the great white whale of mathematical research." in the context of "John Derbyshire, Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.