Using the method, he combined a quadratic form we’ll call Q with itself to find a new form, Q2. The idea wasn’t entirely new; randomness is the force behind many profound ideas in number theory, including the twin prime conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis. They didn’t directly answer Gauss’s question but instead a narrower one involving prime numbers, which are only divisible by themselves and 1. “There was number theory, algebraic geometry, topology, a combinatorics section, homological algebra, probability.” But the zero in the 2009 paper and the zero in the 2012 one weren’t the same.