giovedì 4 luglio 2013

A proposito...

... di John Derbyshire: eccolo in un'interpretazione (non proprio entusiasmante) della prima strofa della canzone sull'ipotesi di Riemann composta da Tom Apostol, professore emerito al CalTech: 




Caliamo un velo pietoso?

 Il testo completo:
Where are the zeroes of zeta of s?
G.F.B. Riemann has made a good guess;
They're all on the critical line, saith he,
And their density's one over 2 p log t.

This statement of Riemann's has been like a trigger,
And many good men, with vim and with vigour,
Have attempted to find, with mathematical rigour,
What happens to zeta as mod t gets bigger.

The efforts of Landau and Bohr and Cramer,
Littlewood, Hardy and Titchmarsh are there,
In spite of their effort and skill and finesse,
In locating the zeros there's been little success.

In 1914 G.H. Hardy did find,
An infinite number do lay on the line,
His theorem, however, won't rule out the case,
There might be a zero at some other place.

Oh, where are the zeroes of zeta of s ?
We must know exactly, we cannot just guess.
In order to strengthen the prime number theorem,
The integral's contour must never go near 'em.

Let P be the function p minus Li,
The order of P is not known for x high,
If square root of x times log x we could show,
Then Riemann's conjecture would surely be so.

Related to this is another enigma,
Concerning the Lindelöf function mu sigma.
Which measures the growth in the critical strip,
On the number of zeros it gives us a grip.

But nobody knows how this function behaves,
Convexity tells us it can have no waves,
Lindelöf said that the shape of its graph,
Is constant when sigma is more than one-half.

There's a moral to draw from this sad tale of woe,
Which every young genius among you should know:
If you tackle a problem and seem to get stuck,
Use the Riemann Mapping Theorem and you'll have better luck.

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