Who Was Ramanujan?
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Who Was Ramanujan?
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Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#2[deleted]
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#350% of the text is the fascinating story of Ramanujan. Unfortunately, the other 50% is a series of shameless product placements for the author's software and boasts about the author's personal and intellectual accomplishments. The story, the boasts, and the ads are all mixed together, so reading the thing all the way to the end was seriously painful.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#450% of the text is the fascinating story of Ramanujan. Unfortunately, the other 50% is a series of shameless product placements for the author's software and boasts about the author's personal and intellectual accomplishments. The story, the boasts, and the ads are all mixed together, so reading the thing all the way to the end was seriously painful.
True. Maybe, skimming through the article without bothering about the hyperlinks would be so much better.
He went to the extent of hyperlinking the words `Madras` and `Sanskrit` to their WolframAlfa search links :/
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#550% of the text is the fascinating story of Ramanujan. Unfortunately, the other 50% is a series of shameless product placements for the author's software and boasts about the author's personal and intellectual accomplishments. The story, the boasts, and the ads are all mixed together, so reading the thing all the way to the end was seriously painful.
haha :D This is typical. I sign up my email and always get advertising mails in disguise of good cause and buzzwords. SW is very keen on selling his expensive baby. And I think he is a rare combination of genius and salesman.
So maybe Trump can sell his presidency, who knows.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#6Mixed 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 surprised to find the piece start out with little self-reference by the author, until:
> The other, slightly more famous, track — less austere and less mathematically oriented — was Eton and Oxford, which happens to be where I went.
How is that relevant in an article titled Who was Ramanujan? It got worse a few paragraphs later, as Wolfram began discussing numeric approximations, and engaging in what was effectively product placement for WolframAlpha and Mathematica. There I was, trying to read about Ramanujan, and Wolfram kept interjecting with comments about his computation engine and his implementations of Ramanujan's formulae.
Toward the end of the article, after the biography of Ramanujan was complete and Wolfram turned to discussing expansions of Ramanujan's results, such topics were fair game. "What if Ramanujan had had Mathematica?" is a valid question. Discussing cellular automata and Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence, etc., etc. was fine at that point, since these are valid expansions to the topic at hand.
Nonetheless, the blatant product placement and continuous breaking of the flow of the text to push some function implemented in WolframAlpha on the reader was extraordinarily annoying, and, frankly, deeply disappointing. If Wolfram sets out to write the unlikely tale of a mysterious letter, and its place in the history of mathematics, as advertised by the subtitle, then I would have hoped that he could leave his egregious self-advertising to the end of the article -- or better yet -- to a separate one altogether.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#7Mixed 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…
I previously wrote here how on his Wikipedia page there is nothing about his family other than some vague reference. A user below pointed out this was because of his fear for his family's privacy. Which is fair enough.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#8Mixed 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…
I previously wrote here how on his Wikipedia page there is nothing about his family other than some vague reference. A user below pointed out this was because of his fear for his family's privacy. Which is fair enough.
What does that have to do with anything?
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#9Mixed 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…
I previously wrote here how on his Wikipedia page there is nothing about his family other than some vague reference. A user below pointed out this was because of his fear for his family's privacy. Which is fair enough.
So what?
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I previously wrote here how on his Wikipedia page there is nothing about his family other than some vague reference. A user below pointed out this was because of his fear for his family's privacy. Which is fair enough.
What does that have to do with anything?
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