team led by Dutchman Herman te Riele and Australian Richard Brent proved that the first 200 million zeros of the Riemann zeta function fall on the line passing through 1/2. However, there was a bet pending between Zagier and Bombieri (two bottles of excellent Bordeaux) that there would be a counterexample among the first 300 million non-trivial zeros. So when Lenstra goes to te Riele’s team and says, “Don’t you know about the bet? Why did you stop at 200 million?”, the Dutch mathematician decides to continue the calculation for another thousand hours and thus proves that the first 300 million zeros of the Riemann zeta function fall on the line passing through 1/2. Bombieri wins the bet and drinks the first of the two bottles with his friend Zagier. This is probably the most expensive bottle of Bordeaux in history: 1,000 hours of supercomputer time.
