Is there a modern equivalent of this book?
Why? It's pure mathematics, that book can't ever get obsolete.
[deleted]
The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#22I'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.
I'm sure you'd enjoy What is Mathematics? by Robbin and Courant. Take a look at it, hope it's kind of what you're looking for.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#23Earlier 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…
Hi! I'm a JEE aspirant - is there any way I could contact you to have a bit of a chat? Of course, only if you're kind enough to accept - I'll understand if you don't, however :)
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prob…
So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be…
I've caught the exceptional by being a commited teacher. You notice that they are ahead of the pack, by different signs: some make great questions in class, others barely say a word but utterly ace the exams, others are incredibile driven and tell you about their interests, others aren't, but when challenged they respond with interesting solutions.
Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. But if you had all the teachers in line with that "pay attention to the exceptional" objective, you'd probably find more than the current[0] "grind students forward into formal education" approach.
[0] I say this being fully aware that may not be the particular case in a region/group, but it certainly seems like the broadly taken "strategy" by most of the education system where I live
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#25I love it. It's literally just a barrage of math, separated into little bite-sized chunks.
Modern textbooks can have a so much fluff with all the flashy pictures and icons and the text on the page being brightly colored or having bubbles drawn around it to be more "engaging" etc.
I found it super annoying as a kid, wish I had something like this.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#26If you want to get a taste of some of what Ramanujan seems to have been occupied with, the mathematical physicist John Baez explained "Ramanujan's easiest formula" in an approachable way https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/ramanujans-e...
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#27Is there a modern equivalent of this book?
Why? It's pure mathematics, that book can't ever get obsolete.
When I was starting college I took an analysis course based on Kolmogorov and Fomin. We didn't work with all sorts of special functions, but focused much more on functional analysis, measure, and multidimensional functions. Later we did Fourier transforms for any locally compact abelian group. What's important in math changes.
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#28Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> : I was top 10 in JEE This should be anti-source if you say you don't need to prepare hard enough.
I did have to prepare hard in those two years, but two years was more than enough. A lot about doing well in an exam as selective as this comes down to winning the genetic lottery. If you do not have the aptitude, then spending 5-6 years wholly devoted to an exam you are not going to crack is going to be an extremely demotivating way to spend your entire teenage life.
Well, this is not a binary classification: there are those fortunate few who have, as you say, won the "genetic intelligence lottery" and sail through school and exams such as this with little to no effort, then there are those who have to study hard for x years in order to make it, then there are those who need extra tutoring, and then there are of course some who even with all the help their parents can afford will not be able to make it.
I (born in Romania, was programming as a hobby since age 12) was in the "extra tutoring" group BTW, then I barely passed the maths, physics etc. exams of the first semesters, but when the actual CS courses started I got better and graduated with pretty passable grades (not that any employer looks at those)...
Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
#30It'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.
A bit off-topic, but I just googled some IIT-JEE questions and found the following:
A large number of bullets are fired in all directions with same speed u. What is the maximum area on the ground on which these bullets will spread.
How can this be possible? Obviously, if I fire the gun from a tower, this area will be larger than when I fire it from the ground, and thus also depends on the height above ground of the gun.