Nigerian professor solves 156-year-old Riemann maths problem to take home $1 million prize

One of the most important problems in mathematics - the Riemann Hypothesis - has finally been solved by a Nigerian professor. Dr Opeyemi Enoch said he made a key breakthrough in 2010 which later enabled him to solve the puzzle, which is one of the seven Millennium Problems in Mathematics. These seven puzzles were set by The Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000 and the organisation will reward Dr Enoch with a $1 million (£658,000) prize for his discovery.

Dr Enoch, who teaches at the Federal University of Oye Ekiti (FUOYE) in Nigeria, said he was motivated to solve the 156-year-old problem because of his students.

He told the BBC that they wanted him to make money from the internet

'The motivation was because my students trusted that the solution could come from me - not because the financial reward and that was why I started trying to solve the problem in the first place,' he said.

The Riemann Hypothesis was proposed by mathematician Bernard Riemann in 1859 and concerns the distribution of prime numbers.

It has become arguably the most famous problem in mathematics, since Fermat's Last Theorem was solved in the 1990s. 

At its most simple, the distribution of prime numbers among all others doesn't follow a regular pattern. 

While this has been checked for the first 10,000,000,000 solutions, it is only now that a 'proof' explaining their distribution beyond this has been found. 

However, The Clay Mathematical institute has neither confirmed nor denied that Dr Enoch has officially solved the problem, simply saying it does not comment on solutions to the Millennium Problems.