“If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?”

—  David Hilbert

Quoted in Mathematical Mysteries : The Beauty and Magic of Numbers (1999) by Calvin C. Clawson, p. 258

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis bee…" by David Hilbert?
David Hilbert photo
David Hilbert 30
German prominent mathematician 1862–1943

Related quotes

Michael Atiyah photo

“This 'Hodge conjecture' has by now achieved a considerable status, almost on a par with the Riemann hypothesis or the Poincaré conjecture.”

Michael Atiyah (1929–2019) British mathematician

[Michael Atiyah, Collected Works: Michael Atiyah Collected Works: Volume 1: Early Papers; General Papers, http://books.google.com/books?id=YJ0cZwxLECAC&pg=PA250, 28 April 1988, Clarendon Press, 978-0-19-853275-0, 250]

Hermann Weyl photo

“After Riemann had made known his discoveries, mathematicians busied themselves with working out his system of geometrical ideas formally; chief among these were Christoffel, Ricci, and Levi-Civita. Riemann… clearly left the real development of his ideas in the hands of some subsequent scientist whose genius as a physicist could rise to equal flights with his own as a mathematician. After a lapse of seventy years this mission has been fulfilled by Einstein.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Source: Space—Time—Matter (1952), Ch. 2 "The Metrical Continuum"

Peter F. Drucker photo

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 246

Tad Williams photo

“I have not slept well since I first entered my brother’s dungeons. While my comfort has improved since then, worry has taken the place of hanging in chains as a denier of rest.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

“There are many kinds of imprisonment,” Jarnauga nodded.
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 43, “The Harrowing” (p. 739).

Cesare Pavese photo

“We were very young. I don't think I ever slept that year, but I had a friend who slept even less than I did. Some mornings you could see him strolling up and down in front of the station when the first trains were arriving and leaving.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Incipit
The devil in the hills (1949)

Kent Hovind photo

“My first question [upon ascending to Heaven], believe it or not, will be, 'Did Adam and Eve have a belly button?' I don't know why, but that has bothered me for years.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution (1996)

Sylvia Plath photo

“I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Ma Shaowu photo

“I have served the Government of China for many years, first the Emperor, and after that the Republican Government at Nanking. I have always tried to do my best; but I must have committed errors--- though I do not know what they were---or this misfortune would not have befallen me. I have lost face.”

Ma Shaowu (1874–1937) Chinese general

News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir, Peter Fleming, 1999, Northwestern University Press, Evanston Illinois, 0810160714, 327, 384, 2010-06-28 http://books.google.com/books?id=6C2aaB3f9P4C&pg=RA1-PA326&dq=ma+shao-wu+flemings&hl=en&ei=ufgXTPKWCIrMMtvMnaUL&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=%20I%20have%20served%20the%20government%20of%20china%20for%20many%20years%2C%20first%20the%20Emperor%2C%20and%20after%20that%20the%20Republican%20Government%20at%20Nanking.&f=false,

Jeremy Corbyn photo

“So I thought my first Prime Ministers Question time I'd do in a slightly different way and I'm sure the Prime Minister's going to absolutely welcome this as he welcomed this idea in 2005 but something has seemed to have happened to his memory during that period. So I sent out an email to thousands of people and asked them what questions they would like to put to the Prime Minister, and I recieved forty thousand replies.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-verdict Jeremy Corbyn makes his debut as leader of the opposition (16 September 2015).
2000s

Tad Williams photo

““I have not slept well since I first entered my brother’s dungeons. While my comfort has improved since then, worry has taken the place of hanging in chains as a denier of rest.”
“There are many kinds of imprisonment,” Jarnauga nodded.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 43, “The Harrowing” (p. 739).

Related topics