Chapter

Prime Evolution (Interview)

EXCERPT

Matthew Watkins’ Web-based Number Theory and Physics Archive and its speculative twin Inexplicable Secrets of Creation—hosted by the mathematics department of Exeter University in the UK where Watkins is an honorary research fellow—have grown into a unique resource. The archive brings together work from the plurality of disciplines contributing to an as yet unnamed field of research concerned with the startling connections between number theory—particularly the Riemann Hypothesis on the distribution of the prime numbers—and the physical sciences. Watkins talks to Collapse about his rôle in, and motivations for, catalysing and disseminating the field, about the latest developments in the search for the hypothetical ‘Riemann dynamics’, about the nature of discovery in mathematics and its academic and cultural status…