The Trailer for 'Prime Target' Makes Math Thrilling
Mathematics isn't a subject that most people tend to view as all that exciting. (Though Tom Stoppard devotees who love Arcadia specifically will almost certainly — and rightly! — argue otherwise. However, Apple TV+ is banking on the power of prime numbers in its latest British thriller, Prime Target, a tale of digital hacking and espionage starring Leo Woodall (One Day) and Quintessa Swindell (Black Adam).
The series follows the story of Edward Brooks (Woodall), a recent maths graduate who may have found a pattern in the distribution of prime numbers that holds the key to unlocking every computer in the world. For those of you who (like yours truly) did not do great in math class, here is a refresher: Prime numbers are integers only divisible by one and themselves. The Greek philosopher Euclid hypothesized that there is an infinite number of prime numbers, and many theorists today still debate precisely how many prime numbers exist and how they're distributed among the remaining whole numbers.
While the trailer for Prime Target doesn't explicitly mention this, one has to assume young Edward has somehow proven the Riemann Hypothesis. This one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old theory still stumps mathematicians today. In doing so, he has made himself a target for many unsavory types who want to control the information infrastructure to which this solution would likely give them access.
