"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... Selberg had become godfather to the problem... a man who had spent half a century doing battle with the primes. Sarnak... [had] recently joined forces with ... 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. ...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... the undisputed master of the Riemann Hypothesis. He had earned his for the most significant result to date about the error between the true number of primes and Gauss's guess - a proof of... the 'Riemann Hypothesis on average'. ...Bombieri, like Katz, has a fine eye for detail."