A Numerical Mystery From the 19th Century Finally Gets Solved

In the early 1950s, a group of researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study embarked on a high-tech project. At the behest of John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine, the physicist Hedvig Selberg programmed the IAS’s 1,700-vacuum-tube computer to calculate curious mathematical sums whose origins stretched back to the 18th century. The sums were related to quadratic Gauss sums, named for the famed…

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