Who wants to be a millionaire mathematician?
Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.
When I was a doctoral student, there was a rumor circulating that, early in his career, the famous American basketball player Magic Johnson had received the following advice from a well-meaning professor: “Forget sports and learn math, you’ll make a lot more money!”
I was never able to confirm this rumor, but it's a fact that Magic Johnson has always been a big fan of mathematics. Retired from the court and a successful businessman, he remains very active in initiatives aimed at stimulating an interest in the subject among young people.
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As much as it pains me to admit, I have to say that mathematicians with a lot of money are rare, certainly harder to find than millionaires who like mathematics and support it – who, of course, are also highly valued.
Among these latter figures, the American businessman London T. Clay (1926 – 2017) stands out, who, 20 years ago, created the Clay Mathematics Institute, a private non-profit organization "dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge".
The Clay Institute organizes conferences and schools, awards scientific prizes, and grants highly competitive scholarships, particularly to bright young people from around the world: Brazilian Artur Avila, winner of the Fields Medal in 2014, was a Clay scholar early in his career.
But their most publicized initiative, launched in 2000, is the million-dollar prizes that the Clay Institute offers for solving seven famous mathematical problems: $1 million for each of these seven "Millennium Problems".
The oldest problem on the list is the Riemann Hypothesis. It is a statement about the zeros of a certain function, called the zeta function, formulated in 1859 by the German Bernhard Riemann (1826 – 1886) in his studies in number theory.
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