In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute picked seven of the greatest unsolved problems in the field, named them "Millennium Problems" and offered $1 million for the solution of each of them.
David Auburn's Pulitzer prize-winner Proof, which ran at London's Donmar Warehouse last year with Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead, concerns itself with a mad mathematician who has apparently discovered the proof of one of the greatest unsolved problems of number theory.
The Riemann hypothesis, first tossed off by Bernhard Riemann in 1859 in a paper about the distribution of prime numbers, is still widely considered to be one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics, sure to wreath its conqueror with glory -- and, incidentally, lots of cash.
How, exactly, this happened is known as the baryogenesis problems, and it remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics.
The director of the group, Dr Madhumita Puri, says that though society has been tackling the issue of poverty, it remains one of the greatest unsolved problems of the current generation.
