Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million-dollar problems.

If Louis de Branges really has cracked the Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No Internet transaction would be safe, since they all depend on generating prime numbers; the Riemann hypothesis would explain primes and possibly allow for them to be easily cracked.

If Grigori Perelman has proven the Poincare conjecture, dealing with three-dimensional objects existing in the fourth dimension, it would have profound implicatons for the understanding of spacetime.

Anyone solving either of these — or five other “millennium problems” — could be awarded $1 million by the Clay Mathematics Institute.