2013-07-15
Explanation
The comic imagines Batman receiving a riddle from the Riddler, one of his classic villains. But instead of a typical riddle with a clever wordplay answer, the Riddler has written: "If the real part of all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function is 0.5, the bomb's beneath a downtown dive." The note is signed "-Riddler." Below the panel, a caption reads: "Fun Fact: Batman hasn't left his study in 10 years."
The joke is that the Riddler has made his clue contingent on solving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. The Riemann Hypothesis, proposed by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, conjectures that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have a real part equal to 1/2. It remains unproven and is one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize Problems, with a one-million-dollar bounty. Batman, despite being a genius, has been stuck in his study for a decade trying to solve it before he can locate the bomb.
The votey panel shows Alfred informing Batman that "Sir, Riddler has assumed control of Europe," to which Batman responds "Shh. Busy." This extends the joke by showing the catastrophic real-world consequences of Batman's obsession with the math problem. The comic brilliantly merges superhero fiction with pure mathematics, suggesting that even the World's Greatest Detective is no match for an unsolved conjecture in number theory.