In a paper posted in September, Paul Nelson of the Institute for Advanced Study has solved a version of the subconvexity problem, a kind of lighter-weight version of Riemann’s question. The proof is a significant achievement on its own and teases the possibility that even greater discoveries related to prime numbers may be in store. “It’s a bit of a far-fetched dream, but you could hyper-optimistically hope that maybe we get some insight in how the [Riemann hypothesis] works by working on problems like this,” Nelson said.