I agree that Quanta can be irritatingly stretchy with the metaphors sometimes, but to be fair, "What's the biggest couch you can fit through this hallway corner" is inherently easier to explain to laypeople than like, the Riemann Hypothesis.
i.e. if you apply the zeta function to a complex number, and you get zero, then that number must have been either a negative even integer or had a half as its real part.
What could be simpler than that? Those are all fairly simple concepts, and the definition of the function itself is nothing too exotic. I think any highschooler should be able to understand the statement and compute some values of zeta numerically. I'd like to see a statement about couches written so succinctly with only well-defined terms!
(I'm being intentionally a bit silly, but part of the magic of the Riemann Hypothesis is that it's relatively easy to understand its statement, it's the search for a proof that's astonishingly deep.)
That's a good point. I do remember doing problems related to extending formulae outside the radius of convergence in my final year before university, but I don't think it's fair to ask for proper complex analysis from 17-year-olds.
