Riemann's paper, "On the number of primes less than a given magnitude," is the reason why I decided to study mathematics (at the graduate level and beyond). I read the paper as an undergraduate and I was very impressed by the techniques that Riemann used to study the properties of the prime counting function. In particular, I was blown away by Riemann's use of complex analysis, fourier analysis, and asymptotic analysis to study a problem in number theory, which I thought was a distant area of mathematics. This paper is truly a work of art and is less than 10 pages.

Riemann's paper, "On the number of primes less than a given magnitude," is the reason why I decided to study mathematics (at the graduate level and beyond). I read the paper as an undergraduate and I was very impressed by the techniques that Riemann used to study the properties of the prime counting function. In particular, I was blown away by Riemann's use of complex analysis, Fourier analysis, and asymptotic analysis to study a problem in number theory, which I thought was a distant area of mathematics. This paper is truly a work of art and is less than 10 pages.