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The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

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Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#61

Post by Asymmetryk »

flaubere wrote: post #44
ItsMonkk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless this is the bottleneck and Standford isn't harder than NJIT and at Google you work at on some project that gets cancelled and you never actually had to be all that good to stay with the Elite. Intelligence is speed. Knowledge is distance. If you are very smart and other kids are not as smart, if you give them more time then they can reach the same benchmark as you. When metrics become targeted, it is a sign th…

I'm sure there are lots of bright people who are coasting at either Stanford or Google. If that's your goal, you might well achieve it. But at the same time, there are people who are going to be vastly more successful than that. The ones who revolutionize whole fields.

shouldn't everyone attending a top school be decidedly coasting along in some way about their education, so they can optimise preferred areas?

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#62

Post by cratermoon »

Ramanujan: Srinivasa Ramanujan. born December 22, 1887, Erode, India—died April 26, 1920, Kumbakonam

in 1913, the English mathematician G. H. Hardy received a strange letter from an unknown clerk in Madras, India. The ten-page letter contained about 120 statements of theorems on infinite series, improper integrals, continued fractions, and number theory .... Every prominent mathematician gets letters from cranks, and at first glance Hardy no doubt put this letter in that class. But something about the formulas made him take a second look, and show it to his collaborator J. E. Littlewood. After a few hours, they concluded that the results "must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them".

https://www.usna.edu/Users/math/meh/ramanujan.html

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#63

Post by alex_smart »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #60
alex_smart wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The success of JEE in selecting excellent students year after year is evidence to the contrary. When the measure is set high enough, it actually becomes an excellent motivating factor in itself. Do you think the people participating in the various Olympiads (IMO, IPhO etc) not benefit from the experience? How about the Olympics?

While I am not Indian and the only thing that I know of this is what I have read here and from having watched 3 Idiots(2009), all metricization is the same. You can not test intelligence, you can only test knowledge. But everyone wants to know intelligence. The examples you cite are finding the farthest distance in their field, and the only people capable of going that distance are people who move fast AND work hard.…

>You can not test intelligence, you can only test knowledge.

You absolutely can test for a combination of intelligence and knowledge.

>But everyone wants to know intelligence.

Seldom do people actually care about intelligence in isolation. What use is intelligence without the discipline and ability to apply yourself towards a goal for a considerable length of time?

>As the people who study for a long time keep increasing their studying, the scores naturally improve

That simply does not work. Even with the coaching industry trying to lure parents into sending kids to them since Kindergarten, year after year it turns out that the students who do best in the JEE have only had two years of dedicated preparation. Because that is all the time that is needed for a talented student to prepare for the material that is being tested.

> and therefore they need to make the test harder to keep the same pass rate

If anything, the JEE has gotten easier with time.

Honestly, your entire argument seems to be based on dogma and not evidence. Selecting for the top 1% students by their aptitude for math/engineering, within an acceptable error margin, is not really as difficult a problem as you are making it out to be.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#64

Post by dartharva »

wbl wrote: post #27
dartharva wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But this specific book only covers elementary-to-intermediate topics in Algebra, Geometry and Calculus from the looks of it. It isn't likely to change as much at all.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#65

Post by rdedev »

alex_smart wrote: post #42
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

The problem with this approach is that it is too dependent on the goodness and honesty of said teachers. Anytime you rely more on human beings, you also bring in the typical human problems like self-interest, politics, biases, connections etc. Your approach is not going to work in a country like India. We are a resource-starved nation where people have the mentality of securing every little advantage they can find fo…

My issue with JEE and the entrance examination system as a whole in India is that it grades students based on a combination of just 3 subjects, physics, chemistry and maths. It dosent matter if you are passionate about computer science and you have the talent to code well, it won't get you a seat into the CS department at any IIT. Atleast it was like this when I was preparing for it. I don't know if the system is the same currently. It would be nice if there was some other optional exam that you could take to prove your competence in other subjects.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#66

Post by 1024core »

nindalf wrote: post #45
alex_smart wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this approach is that it is too dependent on the goodness and honesty of said teachers. Anytime you rely more on human beings, you also bring in the typical human problems like self-interest, politics, biases, connections etc. Your approach is not going to work in a country like India. We are a resource-starved nation where people have the mentality of securing every little advantage they can find fo…

> The beauty of JEE Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. You talk about disadvantages for rural students. This is important, because the vast majority of people in India live in villages or small towns, not the big cities. Tell me though, how many students from villages and small towns do well in JEE without moving to a coaching centre in a bigger town? Personal anecdotes aside, you'll find that urban st…

I grew up in a small village and hadn't heard of JEE before I entered the 12th grade. I tried to prepare by myself and failed spectacularly. A lot of the questions rely on tricks or insights that you typically learn only in coaching classes. My neighbor's son, who actually went to school in a nearby big town, had signed up for coaching classes. He did much better than me, and from chatting with him (post-exam), I could tell he had learned these tricks in his coaching classes.

So, clearly, lack of coaching classes hurt my chances.

In any case, I never joined the IITs, but joined another engineering college thanks to my scoring very well in the final exam.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#67

Post by daveslash »

As I understand this, this book is the one that Ramanujan read that helped him unleash his inner genius. When I first read the link title, I thought this was a book written by (or at least co-written by) Ramanujan that unleashed his genius to the greater Mathematical world. I now understand this to be the former, not the latter.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#68

Post by alex_smart »

rdedev wrote: post #65
alex_smart wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this approach is that it is too dependent on the goodness and honesty of said teachers. Anytime you rely more on human beings, you also bring in the typical human problems like self-interest, politics, biases, connections etc. Your approach is not going to work in a country like India. We are a resource-starved nation where people have the mentality of securing every little advantage they can find fo…

My issue with JEE and the entrance examination system as a whole in India is that it grades students based on a combination of just 3 subjects, physics, chemistry and maths. It dosent matter if you are passionate about computer science and you have the talent to code well, it won't get you a seat into the CS department at any IIT. Atleast it was like this when I was preparing for it. I don't know if the system is the…

If you spend five minutes thinking about the problem at hand, you will yourself realize why things have to be the way they are.

Anyway, you can take heart in the fact that if your goal is just to learn programming, a computer science department at an IIT is probably the last place you want to be. I'm only half joking. The curriculum is tilted heavily towards theory, reflecting the attitudes of the professors who obviously come from an academic background (most of them have probably never programmed professionally).

There was only one course where anyone is actually going to even try to teach you programming, but that is actually a pretty basic programming course in the first semester. Everything else you are supposed to learn on your own, through "assimilation". There are several courses in your third year that require significant programming skills, so if you haven't learnt those skills on your own outside the classroom by that time, you're kind of fucked.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#69

Post by khazhoux »

xNeil wrote: post #22
khazhoux wrote: post #7

I'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.

Thanks. Looks pretty fantastic.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#70

Post by khazhoux »

kenny87 wrote: post #48
khazhoux wrote: post #7

I'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.

MAA has its Basic Library List: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/the-basic-library-list...

The list contains 2,963 books!
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