The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
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The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
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Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#2It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12.
These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#3It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.
For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#4It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.
For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.
[deleted]
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#5It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.
For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.
>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier.
That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer you have to get completely bored and burnt-out by the process.
Source: I was top 10 in JEE and personally know more than half the people who were in top 100 in my year.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.
>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer…
That’s not a great source. Sounds like extreme sampling bias to me. What I’m saying is, you don’t know what it’s like being mediocre at school. I do.
In my experience, being at the top is extremely motivating. It encourages you to put in even more effort. The opposite is also true - when you feel like you’ve given it everything but you’re still in middle of the pack, you get burned out. It’s easy for someone who probably never needed any coaching to tell people “nah it’s just FOMO”. It’s not. As distasteful as the industry is, a small edge means you do better than others at 14, which can motivate you to put in more effort. That effect compounds over time.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#7I'd love to see recommendations of similarly "powerful" math books in circulation today. And I mean books that actually taught you a ton of math, not books that contain a ton of interesting-looking math but mostly sit unread.
Tim Gowers' Princeton Companion to Mathematics comes to mind, but I don't own it and I'm not sure if it's breadth-over-quality.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.
>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer…
> : I was top 10 in JEE
This should be anti-source if you say you don't need to prepare hard enough.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#9Is there a modern equivalent of this book?
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#10I'd love to see recommendations of similarly "powerful" math books in circulation today. And I mean books that actually taught you a ton of math, not books that contain a ton of interesting-looking math but mostly sit unread. Tim Gowers' Princeton Companion to Mathematics comes to mind, but I don't own it and I'm not sure if it's breadth-over-quality.
Seconded.
This brings to mind "Disturbing the Universe", a selection of autobiographical essays by physicist Freeman Dyson, where he mentions he learned differential equations as a 12-year-old by working through 700 problems in Piaggio's "Differential Equations" over the summer vacation, after which learning general relativity became a breeze.