There's a scene in the movie Apollo 13 that never fails to get a chuckle from audiences now. A desperate scheme to bring the crippled spacecraft home has been hatched by engineers at NASA Mission Control, but to make sure it was feasible, calculations would have to be made. The next shot is of teams of men busily working slide rules—the high-tech, high-speed calculators of the day.

In real life, one of those engineers with slide rules was Mack Martin.

Martin, who worked in launch operations during the Apollo years, was known for his practicality and his head for numbers. Now retired, Martin has taken up another, even more difficult mission: solving one of the most intractable problems in mathematics.

And Martin believes he's found the answer. But before he can claim credit—and a million-dollar prize—he has to overcome another problem, one no one has yet to solve.

Bernhard Reimann

Back in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Martin worked for North American Aviation and Rockwell, at first designing and testing high performance aircraft for the Navy. He was transferred to Cape Canaveral as Apollo began its push for the moon. He rose through the ranks to become assistant spacecraft chief for launch operations. He helped launch all the moon landings and the Apollo/Soyuz link-up in the 1970s, and worked on the Space Shuttle program until his retirement in the 1980s. He later served as a consultant to the Air Force.

But Martin was also known as a math whiz. "About everybody I worked with knew I like math," Martin said. "There was a kid involved with fueling the Apollo vehicle, and one of the techs told him that he ought to see me about a problem he had. He wanted to reproduce the shape of the landau window on the Ford Thunderbird he was rebuilding." (That oval window was found on some models.)

"I told him I could sit him down and in five minutes he'd know how to do it." Martin said. "He was dumbfounded that it was so simple. He walked out the trailer knowing how to make any shape or size of an ellipse."

A few years ago, a friend showed Martin a newspaper clipping about a math contest and suggested that Martin try his hand at solving one of seven intractable problems. "At first I didn't want to get involved, because it was so-called pure math," Martin said. "But I started looking into it and I got interested in the Riemann Hypothesis."

The hypothesis involves the Riemann Zeta function, z(s), and according to the 19th century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, the behavior of the function is closely related to the frequency of prime numbers. He hypothesized that all interesting solutions to the equation z(s)=0 would lie in a straight line, but no one has proved this to the satisfaction of the mathematics community.

A solution would buoy the spirits of cryptographers, who need an endless supply of prime numbers to stay ahead of code-breaking computers. The Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Mass., has identified the Riemann Hypothesis as one of the seven Millennium Problems. The Navier-Stokes Equations are another. The institute has offered a million-dollar prize for each solution.

Martin spent almost three years wrestling with the Riemann Hypothesis, investigating various ways to get a handle on it. "It has tentacles," he said, "that reach into many different areas."

Finally, he hit on a solution. In his proof, according to Martin (and inexpertly boiled down here), the number of "zeros" generated increases as the solution takes on larger and larger swathes. At the limit of infinity, there is an infinite number of "zeros." QED.

Martin has sent his proof to mathematicians for evaluation, but even if it turns out to be bulletproof, he won't be holding a check any time soon. The rules set out by the Clay Mathematics Institute stipulate that a proposed solution must be published in an internationally recognized, refereed journal.

Very few such journals publish papers by non-mathematicians, and the most prestigious of those has a multi-year publication backlog. After publication, the solution must stand up to at least two years of scrutiny by the mathematics community. Only after this gauntlet will a proposed solution be considered for the Millennium Prize.

That's a problem for Martin. He's seventy-nine years old, and actuarially speaking, even if his solution survives the process, he may not.

All he wants is credit for getting the right answer, Martin said. And though the odds are in many ways stacked against him—a retired amateur trying to outshine a century's worth of mathematicians—don't count him out. He did, after all, help put a man on the moon.

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