Mathematician claims to have solved the Reimann hypothesis

One of the world's most renowned mathematicians showed how he solved the 160-year-old Riemann hypothesis at a lecture earlier this week.

Sir Michael Atiyah, who has already won the two biggest prizes in mathematics - the Fields Medal and Abel Prize - took the stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany to present his work.

To solve the hypothesis you need to find a way to predict the occurrence of every prime number, even though primes have historically been regarded as randomly distributed.

Sir Michael's solution will need to be checked by other mathematicians and then published before it is fully accepted. 

Only then, will he be able to claim the prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge (CMI).

The Riemann hypothesis is one of seven unsolved “Millennium Prizes” from CMI, each worth $1m.

Sir Michael said he used work from John von Neumann and Friedrich Hirzebruch to help him on his way to solving the problem.

Mathematician Keith Devlin wrote in 1998: “Ask any professional mathematician what the single most important open problem in the entire field is, and you are almost certain to receive the answer 'the Riemann hypothesis.'”