An entire year.
Counting the preparation and groundwork, it had probably taken even longer.
Of all the problems Lu Zhou had solved in his life, this was probably the one that had demanded the most effort and taken the longest.
To resolve the problem of the distribution of zeros, he had tried almost every possible research approach before finally choosing to narrow the critical strip. He had also created the mathematical tool known as the Hyperelliptic Curve Analysis Method, using it to prove the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis.
And to narrow that elusive critical strip down to the critical line, he had tried almost every method he could think of.
But the rewards were just as immense as the effort.
It was no exaggeration to say that even if all the problems he had solved and all the honors he had earned in mathematics so far were placed on one side of a balance, they would not outweigh this single proposition.
To give the simplest example, if the Riemann Hypothesis held true, the corollary that every odd number greater than 7 could be expressed as the sum of three primes would follow directly. Anyone with even a little knowledge of number theory knew that this was, in fact, the weak form of the Goldbach Conjecture.
It was not until 2013 that Professor Harald Helfgott, a researcher at the École Normale Supérieure of Paris, proved this weak form using Fourier analysis of functions on a circle. His proof was published in two papers in Inventiones Mathematicae, one of the four leading mathematics journals.
And this was only one example of the power of the Riemann Hypothesis.
Nearly half of the research results in analytic number theory throughout the twentieth century had been developed under the two alternative assumptions that the Riemann Hypothesis was