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Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

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Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#251

Post by dspillett »

babyent wrote: post #5

That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…

> My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science.

I think in this example you are vastly overestimating the “average genius”, in comparison to those rare few who truly push the boundaries. We tend to do this because of the way our brains estimate things of significant scale, like the fact that keeps floating around social media about how bad most of us are at having a concept of the difference between thousands, millions, and billions.

There are many valedictorians (of the order of some per thousand) but few Ramanujans (of the order of tens per billion?), and gearing an overall education system specifically for those few could do a disservice to a great many others at every level below. Ramanujan was not the result of an effective education system anyway: like a lot of other world changing minds he was largely self-taught. Perhaps there is room to encourage more investigation to the side of the curriculum a lot more than we currently do, but the problems that stop other "Ramanujan"s, that could so easily have scuppered Ramanujan himself, are usually not caused by the education system but by other societal problems (death & disease, racism, sexism, caste or class biases, etc.) not giving them a chance to explore & self-learn or have useful access to education & other resources at all. Addressing those problems will help a much wider chunk of the population, as well as reducing constraints for the truly exceptional geniuses¹ amongst them.

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[1] And of course those non-geniuses who luck out and have that one brilliant idea. Their contribution is often vital for progress too, and I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are true geniuses!

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#253

Post by kadal »

rramadass wrote: post #133
dyauspitr wrote: post #7

Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.

This is entirely the fault of the Indian Education System and Popular Media. The current generation knows almost nothing about these Indian Greats. In order to rectify the status quo; 1) Everybody should get the monthly magazine Science Reporter published by National Institute of Science Communication and Policy Research (NIScPR), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India. which gives a o…

To this excellent list, I would humbly add Bhavana: https://bhavana.org.in/

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#254

Post by scotty79 »

When we get to cloning people he's probably the most worthy person to get cloned first. Best chance of getting something usefult from a specific genetic makeup. You'd still probably need to make hundreds of clones to get one anywhere close to his level due to random epigenetics, even if raised in optimal environment but it's the best shot.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#255

Post by uncharted9 »

non_low_key wrote: post #250
profsummergig wrote: post #35

In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a tragedy that he died so young.

What do you mean by savage "native" here ? He is coming from a culture of long and rich intellectual history.

I think he was referring to the way colonizers commonly referred to the subjects of their colonies pejoratively as "savage natives". This applies to Native Americans, Africans, South Asians, etc. Racism was the norm in the old days.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#256

Post by circlefavshape »

scotty79 wrote: post #246
dagw wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned anything professionally useful in English Even as someone who went full 'STEM' for both my education and career, English is probably among the most professionally useful courses I did in high school. A surprisingly large part of my job involves reading things, understanding them, and then writing a clear and reasoned response to them, all skills I first learned and really got to practice in English class.

Reading and writing is a huge part of software development. But I didn't learn these skills at school. If anything, school soured them for me, by making me read things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't want to write. School should let you read what you want. Today that you read it could be checked with AI prepared quiz. And writing should be mostly focused on communication not essays. Very small fract…

> making me read things I didn't want to read and writing things I didn't want to write

How to do things you don't want to do is a fundamental requirement for adulthood, and probably the most important skill anyone learns in school

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#257

Post by [deleted] »

kumarm wrote: post #159
profsummergig wrote: post #35

In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a tragedy that he died so young.

If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste that is supposed to be educated (Representing probably Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?

[deleted]

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#258

Post by gen_greyface »

kumarm wrote: post #159
profsummergig wrote: post #35

In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a tragedy that he died so young.

If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste that is supposed to be educated (Representing probably Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?

caste system in india is an evil that persists even today, and is a complex topic. majority of the indian-origin users on hackernews or people in the IT community are very likely upper castes. see [1] If you are interested to learn more about the caste system in india it is recommended to get your facts from multiple sources. start from [2]

[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987883 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#259

Post by scotty79 »

elgenie wrote: post #190
kumarm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste that is supposed to be educated (Representing probably Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?

Ramanujan himself survived childhood smallpox and died at just 32 from what's thought to be complications from an earlier bout with dysentery. But he had lucked out in that he was born male in an urban setting in a high caste, with access to education, textbooks, and the language of the imperial core, and managed to make it to adulthood at all. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstei…

If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the right (genius) person in the right place at the right time in history of science to marry together things other people figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.

Re: Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

#260

Post by moomin »

babyent wrote: post #5

That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…

Honestly I suspect a lot of potentially able people get left by the wayside in our lowest cost educational system. It's particularly tough on neurodiverse people, which one has to suspect included Ramanujan.
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