Douglas Adams may have been onto something. > Now, there are certain attributes of the Riemann zeta function called its moments which should give rise to a seq

Douglas Adams may have been onto something. > Now, there are certain attributes of the Riemann zeta function called its moments which should give rise to a sequence of numbers. However, before the Seattle conference, only two of these moments were known: 1, as calculated by Hardy and Littlewood in 1918; and 2, calculated by Ingham in 1926. > The next number in the series was suggested as 42 by Conrey (now also at Bristol) and Ghosh in 1992. > The challenge for the quantum physicists then, was to use their quantum methods to check the number 42 and to calculate further moments in the series, while the number theorists tried to do the same using their methods. > Prof Jon Keating and Dr Nina Snaith at Bristol describe the energy levels in quantum systems using random matrix theory. Using RMT methods they produced a formula for calculating all of the moments of the Riemann zeta function. This formula confirmed the number 42.