Enoch Opeyemi, the Nigeria professor who attempted a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

A photo of Enoch Opeyemi.


During the third trimester of 2015, the Nigeria news media went agog with the news of professor Enoch Opeyemi, a professor at the federal university, Oye-Ekiti, a small town in Ekiti state, Nigeria, who claimed to have found a solution to the 156 years old Riemann hypothesis problem.
His claim was acknowledged by some professionals in the field of number theory, among who was Dr. Nina Ringo, a Russian mathematician in the field of control theory, who stated that the German problem has found a solid solution in Nigeria after a phone call conversation with the Nigerian professor. Enoch, a senior lecturer at the Federal University in Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria, announced a proof at a talk during the International Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMS 2015) held in Vienna in 2015.
At the conference, Enoch presented preliminary results on the "spectrum of a matrix representation of the Riemann zeta function" and derived some important conclusions which appear to be the most plausible solution to the Riemann problem ever conceived.
The Riemann hypothesis was tagged with a $1m dollars price and the expectation was that the Nigeria professor would cling the price but unfortunately the US based clay mathematics institute refused to confirm Enoch's solution and no attribution was made to his name regarding the solution on the institute's webiste. Enoch uploaded his proof on academia.edu website where it faced much criticism by researchers citing issues on plagiarism. He was accused of plagiarizing the work of a Yale university student in USA. Others claimed he hacked into the computer of a late professor where he got his accurate solution. During an interview with TVC, a Nigerian television news channel in 2015,
Enoch said the solution to the Riemann hypothesis took him 7 years as he started the solution since 2008. He was motivated by four of his students who had brought forth the question to him in the quest to make money by solving millennial math problems. Enoch who hesitated initially, later gave them a listening ear and began a quest for a solution. 

Now what is the Riemann hypothesis all about? 
the Riemann hypothesis is a conjecture that the Riemann zeta function has its zeros only at the negative even integers and complex numbers with real part $\frac{1}{2}$, proposed by Bernherd Riemann in 1859. 
The Riemann zeta function $\zeta(s)$ is a function whose argument $s$ may be any complex number other than $1$, and whose values are also complex. It has zeros at the negative even integers; i.e $\zeta(s)=0$ when $s=-2n, \forall{n=1,2,3,...,}$ these are called trivial zeros, however the negative even integers are not the only values for which zeta function is equal to zero, the other values are called nontrivial zeros and that is why the Riemann hypothesis states that "The real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is $\frac{1}{2}$". Thus, if the hypothesis is correct, all the nontrivial zeros lie on the critical line consisting of the complex numbers $\frac{1}{2}+i t$, where $t$ is a real number and $i$ is the imaginary unit.

Riemann Zeta function is defined as a natural number $n$ raised to a complex exponent $z$ written as $n^z$, take the reciprocal of this natural number $n$ raise it to a complex exponent $z$, it will yield $\frac{1}{n^z}$, since the natural numbers are infinite, we add all their reciprocals raised to the complex exponent $z$. It is the infinite sum of all these reciprocals that we call the Riemann Zeta Function which is given by:
Riemann Zeta function for $s$ is
$\zeta(s)=\sum^\infty_{n=1}\frac{1}{n^2}=\frac{1}{1^2}+\frac{1}{2^2}+\frac{1}{3^2}+...$.