Michael Atiyah, a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, announced on Monday at a scientific conference in Heidelberg, Germany, that he had devised a "simple proof" for the Riemann Hypothesis, a problem relating to patterns of prime numbers that has defied efforts to solve it since it was first proposed in 1859.
If Atiyah is right about his proof, he could claim a $1 million prize set aside in 2000 for the first person to prove the hypothesis. A proof of Riemann, which would provide a sort of "map" of prime numbers, could also have implications for cryptography and other fields beyond mathematics.
But Atiyah's peers are dubious of the claim.