OLLI Primal Obsessions, course leader Tom Naps

Welcome to the course home page for the Fall 2022 OLLI course "Primal Obsessions", which will meet for seven Wednesdays from 10:00 - 11:30 in Room 4 of the Magrath Library beginning October 5. Feel free to contact me (thomas.naps@gmail.com) anytime you have questions or concerns about the course.

An outline of what we'll be doing each week. Depending on the pace we set and your feedback to me, this "plan" is likely to evolve.

• Week 1: Introduction to the fascination of prime numbers
• Week 2: Finish up last week's material and begin looking at the role primes play in public key cryptography.
• Week 3: Finish up last week's material and begin describing the quest to find the prime counting function
• Week 4: RSA wrap-up, the prime counting problem, Euler and the zeta function
• Week 5: Euler and Fourier set the stage for Riemann and his hypothesis
• Week 6: Riemann's Hypothesis -- What does it actually say? What are its implications?
• Week 7: Finishing up. The mysterious intersection of the primes, randomness, and quantum physics.