| [I may need assistance from some British site visitors on this one!] An e-mail from Charles Freudenthal has suggested to me that the pilot episode of the TV Series "Lewis" (a spin-off of the popular Inspector Morse mysteries) featured a character won a Fields Medal for his work on Goldbach's Conjecture and a discussion of perfect numbers in the context of computer passwords. I'm afraid I have not seen it and worry that I may have gotten some of this wrong. (For instance, none of the plot summaries I have located for this episode mention any of this at all, except for this blog which doesn't mention the name of the episode! Any assistance would be appreciated.
For those who may not know, let me briefly mention that Goldbach's Conjecture is a very old empirical observation regarding prime and even numbers, namely that every even number greater than two appears to be a sum of two prime numbers. That is, any time this has been checked for a given number it has been found to be true. However, as of my writing this in 2009 nobody has figured out either how to prove that it is always the case or found a counter-example. This is of mathematical interest largely because it sounds as if it should be easy to prove or disprove, but clearly it is quite difficult!
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