WHY THE RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS MATTERS By T Patrick Murray It is hard to overstate the significance of the Riemann Hypothesis. For 166 years, it loomed as the Mount Everest of mathematics—the hidden root beneath every prime, every encryption algorithm, and every stochastic flutter of particles and people. It’s not just “a math problem.” It’s the codebook to reality. Proving it would rewire number theory, physics, cryptography, and, by extension, everything that runs on numbers—which, in case you hav