One fairly standard version of the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) is that a specific probability density on the real line has a moment generating function (Laplace transform) that as an analytic function on the complex plane has all its zeros pure imaginary. We'll review a series of results that span the period from the 1920's to 2018 concerning a perturbed version of the RH. In that perturbed version, due to Polya, the log of the probability density is modified by a kind of mass term (in quantum field theory language). This gives rise to an implicitly defined real constant known as the de Bruijn-Newman Constant, Lambda. The conjecture and now theorem (Newman 1976, Rodgers and Tau 2018) that Lambda is greater than or equal to zero is complementary to the RH which is equivalent to Lambda less than or equal to zero; The conjecture/theorem is a version of the dictum that the RH, if true, is only barely so. We'll also briefly discuss some connections with quantum field theory and the Lee-Yang circle theorem.[-]

Fermat showed that every prime $p = 1$ mod $4$ is a sum of two squares: $p = a^2 + b^2$, and hence such a prime gives rise to an angle whose tangent is the ratio $b/a$. Hecke showed, in 1919, that these angles are uniformly distributed, and uniform distribution in somewhat short arcs was given in by Kubilius in 1950 and refined since then. I will discuss the statistics of these angles on fine scales and present a conjecture, motivated by a random matrix model and by function field considerations.[-]

In the lecture we prove a lower estimate for the average of the absolute value of the remainder term of the prime number theorem which depends in an explicit way on a given zero of the Riemann Zeta Function. The estimate is only interesting if this hypothetical zero lies off the critical line which naturally implies the falsity of the Riemann Hypothesis. (If the Riemann Hypothesis is true, stronger results areobtainable by other metods.) The first explicit results in this direction were proved by Turán and Knapowski in the 1950s, answering a problem of Littlewood from the year 1937. They used the power sum method of Turán. Our present approach does not use Turán's method and gives sharper results.[-]