Word: riemann
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Death and taxes aside, two things were long a certainty on the gulf coast of Mississippi: if you died in Biloxi, you would be buried by Jeremiah O'Keefe; if you died in adjacent Gulfport, Bob Riemann would do the honors. A sometimes bitter rivalry existed between their families, but both names remained beacons in the fog of surprise and grief that overcame people upon the death of parents, spouses, siblings and children. Then something happened to Riemann's empire. His mortuaries still bore the name Riemann, and his sons Mike and David still managed the business. Hearses came...
...Loewen seeks to create the illusion that local funeral homes are still run exactly as they always have been, by native sons and daughters with a vested interest in the community. Although Loewen boasts of its acquisitions to shareholders, it otherwise keeps its ownership quiet. Anyone who calls David Riemann today, for example, gets an operator who says, "Riemann Service," just as operators have done since 1920. Says Ray Loewen: "Our objective is to honor the name and be a champion of tradition and history...
What especially galled O'Keefe about Loewen's moving into the area was that after it acquired Riemann, it promptly bought the Wright & Ferguson Funeral Home in Jackson, Mississippi, which had previously sold only O'Keefe's brand of pre-need insurance. Suddenly, however, the Riemanns began selling their own brand through the new acquisition. O'Keefe took his protest directly to Ray Loewen...
...even his wall decorations betray his true love. Scrolled across the back of his room is a poster depicting a graph resembling the output from a seismograph. "It's the Riemann zeta function on the critical line," says Kedlaya. Apparently, solving a problem relating to the function is tantamount in prestige to proving Fermat's Last Theorem...
...along the way by people working to solve Fermat's theorem are full of perplexing problems, and so are other areas of math. A proof of Fermat's famous theorem by no means brings any line of inquiry to an end. Still bedeviling mathematicians are the Poincare Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis, Goldbach's Conjecture, Kepler's sphere-packing problem and dozens of others. There are, in short, enough mind-bending challenges to keep mathematicians busy for at least the next 350 years...