A charming man and a great popularizer, he came from the illustrious University of Göttingen and had had to leave Germany as the Nazis were seizing power.
Rademacher had believed he was disproving the Riemann hypothesis (still open today) by proving that there was necessarily a zero of the Riemann zeta function whose real part was not equal to 1/2. He had gone to see his mathematician friend Carl Ludwig Siegel, who had concluded... that his colleague's reasoning was valid! Alas, Rademacher had made a mistake. He would realize it a few days later and would telephone Siegel in the middle of the night, shouting into the receiver: "It is wrong!" ("C'est faux!").
The chairman [Editor's note: the US equivalent of a director] of the mathematics department at the University of Pennsylvania had not kept it to himself and had announced the false story to journalists without Rademacher's permission. When the mathematician telephoned a journalist to confess his mistake, the journalist replied: "Disproving the Riemann hypothesis did not interest my readers, and I had no intention whatsoever of publishing it. The story of a mathematician making a mistake, on the other hand, is fascinating. Tell me everything..."
