"In the spring of 1997, Connes went to Princeton to explain his new ideas to the big guns: Bombieri, Selberg and Sarnak. Princeton was still the undisputed Mecca of the Riemann Hypothesis despite Paris's push to reclaim its dominance. Selberg had become godfather to the problem - nothing could pass muster before being vetted by a man who had spent half a century doing battle with the primes. Sarnak was the young gun whose rapier-like intellect would cut through anything that was found slightly wanting. He'd recently joined forces with Nick Katz, also at Princeton, one of the undisputed masters of the mathematics developed by Weil and Grothendieck. Together they had proved that the strange statistics of random drums that we believe describe the zeros in Riemann's landscape are definitely present in the landscapes considered by Weil and Grothendieck. Katz's eyes were particularly sharp, and little escaped his penetrating stare. It was Katz who, some years before, had found the mistake in Wiles's first erroneous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. And finally there was Bombieri, sitting in state as the undisputed master of the Riemann Hypothesis. He had earned his Fields Medal for the most significant result to date about the error between the true number of primes and Gauss's guess - a proof of something mathematicians call the 'Riemann Hypothesis on average'. In the quiet of his office overlooking the woods that surround the Institute, Bombieri has been marshalling all his insights of previous years for a final push for the complete solution. Bombieri, like Katz, has a fine eye for detail. A keen philatelist, he once had the chance to purchase a very rare stamp to add to his collection. After scrutinising it carefully he discovered three flaws. He returned the stamp to the dealer, pointing out two of them. The third subtle flaw he kept to himself - in case he is offered an improved forgery at a future date. Any aspiring proof of the Riemann Hypothesis is subjected to an equally painstaking examination."