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Who Was Ramanujan?

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Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#71
post #69
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wow. You must love recursion. I like to discuss, but please make specific points. Like I did above. I made points, a number of them, not sure what you're saying here? And how is it recursive? I am responding to you, that's how discussions work. You were the one to talk about these kind of comments being disingenuous, I was both parodying that and wondering whether you are in fact being so yourself - it seems fashion…

Okay. Some points taken :-) ... I too realize, there is nothing much to argue here, just differ on that article.

Great :) I am glad there was something at least somewhat constructive in there, I did intend to debate the points rather than you or anybody else personally if that wasn't clear.

The irony is that I am not _hugely_ that interested in Wolfram and his tendencies anyway :)

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#72

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

[deleted]

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#73

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

See I neither agree or disagree with your opinions about wolfram.

But by discussing wolfram's character in this thread you have managed to steer entire discussion on wolfram rather than mathematics of Ramanujan. Unfortunately this happens too often in any online discourse, where subject matter is entirely ignored but most of the discussion focuses on tangential stuff. It is especially true when commenting on actual subject matter requires some solid background or research, but somehow many people feel obligated to comment anyways. It is classic low hanging fruit vs contributing something real to the discussion.

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#74

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

To me it seems, Stephan Wolfram talking about his company with nary a "Wolfram" would approach Knights of Nee don't say it absurdity. His name is on the door and the box.

Perhaps there is some vanity behind ̶i̶t̶ that. If so, ̶i̶t̶ the vanity is in the tradition of Ford, Bell, those HP fellows, Cray the supercomputer, and a long line of entrepreneurs. Yet, if the naming is vanity, tis a wan one by Silicon Valley benchmarks, I am thinking of Sherman Fairchild who did not bring the valley to the silicon but instead brought silicon to the valley...and put his cameras in his planes up among the clouds.

For me, putting one's name on the door is not just vanity. Doing so also entails taking the-Truman-buck-stops-with-me responsibility. When Wolfram Mathematica produces an erroneous numerical result, I don't search in vane for Bob Pentium and Lawrence K. Intel, I am afforded the convenience of curseing the man Wolfram directly by the intertweetsbook.

Irregardless of vanity or responsibility motivations, seems to me that people much prefer writing of their contemporaneous experience than writing of the historical Ramanujan. Curiously evidenced here, is writers love more writing of Wolfram not writing of Ramanujan. Who can blame clever Stephan for combining the two.

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#75

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

"...Eton and Oxford, which happens to be where I went" I prefer to be charitable and assume that he wrote this for the purposes of disclosure and to qualify his knowledge of those institutions. I don't think he was drawing a comparison between himself and Ramanujan. Yes - Wolfram has a tendency for self-promotion, and this can be a bit tiresome. But, like others who have commented here, I find the seemingly obligator…

> I find the seemingly obligatory condemnation of him to be tiresome too.

It is indeed totally boring. In fact this whole thread that happens every time anyone posts anything by Wolfram is very dull.

I would say that I do get some value from seeing a rough inappropriate sales pitch : interesting information ratio on posts (not just Wolframs), and it is one of the reasons I frequently visit the comments before going to the page. HN can be susceptible to front page links that have poor ratios.

Still, I'm not sure how we can get that benefit without these terminally dull threads of condemnation and counter condemnation. Really I'd just like a bot to figure out the ratio and display it next to the link. Sounds like a hard problem.

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#76
post #73

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

See I neither agree or disagree with your opinions about wolfram. But by discussing wolfram's character in this thread you have managed to steer entire discussion on wolfram rather than mathematics of Ramanujan. Unfortunately this happens too often in any online discourse, where subject matter is entirely ignored but most of the discussion focuses on tangential stuff. It is especially true when commenting on actual s…

This is a good point but aren't you doing the same thing? sorry that was a cheeky response.

One thing I will say on your point is that this sort of "side" discourse sometimes brings about real good discussion. Maybe the actual article itself dosent spawn anything new or maybe it is too complex for most folks. However, sometimes the comments lead to new articles to explore a "side" idea that came out from the online comments.

So many articles I've read lately start with "There was a great discussion on hacker news on this topic I felt obligated to write about it, you can find it here".

I think this is healthy.

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#77

A very nice article. Personally I'm not bothered by the "self-promotion" others perceive in Wolfram's posts. The criticism in the comments here are all very repetitive and tiresome. I presume many read anything written by Wolfram with the hope of finding something they can point out as self-promotion ;)

I agree. There is already enough literature on Ramanujan to sate the most curious appetites, so the only thing Wolfram can offer that others can't, is his relationship ship as a scholar, to that of another scholar he admires.

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#78

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

There's always this discussion about the author, yet recently it was posted here in HM his blog [1] about Ada Lovelace, which I read and enjoyed quite a bit, and of which I don't remember being distracted by any of his self-promotion at all. I do remember "A New Kind of Science", but it's also ok to forgive and forget.

[1] http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#79

Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…

It kills me how time and again Wolfram writes self-aggrandizing, egotistical articles filled with glib little self-promotional asides, yet so many people seem to jump in to defend him.

The Ada Lovelace article he wrote a while back was really egregious, littering it with comparisons to his Wolfram products, talking about how he had seen further than Babbage because of his cellular automata work. Ugh. So detestable.

Every time there is a Wolfram post, people rightfully point out his pedantic and self-selling attitude, then other people either argue they didn't perceive it that way, or that they are tired of hearing about it and prefer to bash the people doing the important work of calling Wolfram on it instead of bashing Wolfram himself for it.

I'd go further and argue that "What if Ramanujan had had Mathematica?" is ludicrous to appear in an essay like this. It's obviously meant to privilege Wolfram's own products and position them as if they could empower productive and once-in-a-lifetime talented mathematicians, when really few such people would get value from a tool like Mathematica, and who is to say that Ramanujan wouldn't be a supporter of FOSS and boisterously argue that no one should use Mathematica and instead use FOSS tools that approximate it?

It's not reasonable to defend Wolfram on this account by saying of course he will promote his own products, or that he could have promoted them even more but chose not to. That's not reasonable because he is setting out to write a historical essay, not a puff piece, it's not about him or his products. Shoehorning them in has no place and it's not forgivable just because "people plug their own products" or something. If you want to plug your products, write a puff piece about your products, not a historical essay.

Re: Who Was Ramanujan?

#80

A very nice article. Personally I'm not bothered by the "self-promotion" others perceive in Wolfram's posts. The criticism in the comments here are all very repetitive and tiresome. I presume many read anything written by Wolfram with the hope of finding something they can point out as self-promotion ;)

Correct, and it's time for HN to let go of it. Think of it as a test for this community: can we focus on what's interesting in what the man says and resist being trolled by the rest.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wolfram%20derangement%20syndro...

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