Читать книгу Time - Stephen Baxter - Страница 28

From an unpromising grade school in a run-down neighbourhood at the heart of New York City has come what may prove to be the most striking example yet of the recent wave of brilliant children <backgrounder>.

A group of children here – average age just eight – seem to have come up with a proof of the mathematical statement called the Riemann hypothesis. This is concerned with the distribution of prime numbers <click for detail>. The hypothesis is something which generations of professional mathematicians have failed to crack – and yet it has opened up to a bunch of children, in a few weeks of their working together at the school in their lunch breaks.

The result has electrified, terrified, astonished, according to temperament. The children at this New York school are the first to attract serious attention as a potential national resource from the academic and business communities and the federal government.

And it has also become the first to require round-the-clock armed guards.

The news of this obscure mathematical result has crystallized the fear some people seem to be forming over these super-kids. Police were forced to head off a mob that marched out to the school: angry, scared, evidently with ugly intent, a mob that had even included some of the parents and older brothers and sisters of the children themselves …