Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 447 posts

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

#421

Post by freilanzer »

everdrive wrote: post #363
jmcqk6 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is another force at play here - the assumption that there is a platonic ideal good education system that works at every scale of population. Attempting to scale something that large forces people into boxes that fit inside the framework - one must necessarily ignore little detailed differences between humans. But from the perspective of those individual humans, ignoring those little details doesn't real…

There's another potentially missed point. There is no education system, nor any amount of effort which could have granted me the genius of Ramanjuan. He had something I never will. It would be like dream to run faster than Usain Bolt.

Also, there is ADD and the likes which make mastering a subject very difficult or even impossible for many people, regardless of intellect.

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

#422

Post by mandmandam »

fragmede wrote: post #417
mandmandam wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if they didn't want to be? I think that if you tried you could imagine a world where Ramanujans are both supported and respected with nice lives, while also contributing to the future of the species rather than helping dig our own grave. > The other versi…

You mean a world where someone like Terence Tao gets to be a professor of mathematics at UCLA, where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences? That brilliant geniuses have chosen corporate America and to not go into academia is yours and mine and the world's loss, but a defining feature of the Western world is that they get to make that choice for themselves.

> a defining feature of the Western world is that they get to make that choice for themselves.

... As if people outside the West have no self-determination? Pretty questionable, on multiple levels. And another indication of absurdly binary thinking/rhetoric. Good luck with that.

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

#423

Post by jojobas »

recursive wrote: post #407
circlefavshape wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adulthood is freedom. Freedom? That has not been my experience of adulthood. To me adulthood is about making responsible choices based on their consequences for you and the people around you ... which means that the majority of my time is spent doing things that other people need rather than because I want to do them

> To me adulthood is about making responsible choices based on their consequences What is freedom, if not the ability to make those choices?

"Freedom is the recognition of necessity"

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

#424

Post by freilanzer »

wruza wrote: post #245
chandureddyvari wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a relevant quote from Swami Vivekananda on this From Karma Yoga, Chapter: I, Karma in its effect on character— What we say a man “knows”, should, in strict psychological language, be what he “discovers” or “unveils”; what a man “learns” is really what he “discovers”, by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge. We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere in a…

Not sure I follow the explanation. And apologies cause I’m not that familiar with these texts, but afaik it talks about “soul” here, not information? Words like Brahman, Atman come to mind. In case I mistook it, ignore the above. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind Doesn’t it come from the mind’s interaction with the world? I don’t think that any important knowledge comes from doing not…

>> All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind

> Doesn’t it come from the mind’s interaction with the world?

There is no difference between these concepts, is there? In both cases knowledge comes from the mind.

Also, you can come up with ideas without interacting with the outside world, can you not? This feels like nitpicking.

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

#425

Post by freilanzer »

yas_hmaheshwari wrote: post #82
IAmGraydon wrote: post #75

The stories of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who claimed to have derived complex partitions and identities in dreams, have always captivated me. It's as if their minds were tapping into some hidden reservoir of knowledge. I'm curious what drives these intuitive leaps. Was Ramanujan's brain quietly processing patterns during sleep, leveraging its default mode network in ways we're still struggling to unders…

I am also intrigued by this question: What was different for guys like Ramanujan, and how were they able to tap in to this hidden reservoir of knowledge. And how can we replicate it One guy able to tap into this knowledge in dreams is an indication that it is possible. Now, how do we make this the default for everyone is the question I wonder about The way we found one variant of wheat in Mexico that was resistant to…

> how were they able to tap in to this hidden reservoir of knowledge.

My guess would be by filling the reservoir first. After filling it, then you can stir it and extract new knowledge. In other words: you get better at math by studying, reading, and thinking a lot about math. I don't think there has been a brilliant mathematician who has not immersed himself in math at first.

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

#426

Post by ben_w »

scotty79 wrote: post #419
ben_w wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was agreeing with you about these points, sorry if that didn't come across, I was rather tired while writing that. I was also saying that even though the lens of culture, the generally mandatory Shakespeare is overrated.

It's my fault that it didn't come across. English is not my native language. Most of it maps to my brain really well, but there are some phrases that my brain just refuses to properly assimilate. "I concur" is the one. Somehow my brain intuitively maps it rather to "I object" than "I agree" like it should.

Ah, interesting. I would never have guessed from the username. :)

I have a similar problem with a few words in German, despite being in Berlin for 6 years now — "Es war krass" sounds like it should be a bad thing.

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

#429

Post by mandmandam »

uncharted9 wrote: post #255
non_low_key wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the norm now as well.

Only the target has changed. The land grabs and slurs and dehumanization are essentially the same, if sometimes with a modern twist.

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

#430

Post by kenjackson »

seiferteric wrote: post #24
nordsieck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.

Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe y…

If you’re sufficiently good or accomplished at one thing then you’ll be fine. But most students aren’t. Most students who are good at math are just good at math. But if you win two golds at Math Olympiad while in high school or publish a groundbreaking result then your mediocre grades in history will be ignored.

But a 780 on the math SAT isn’t likely to put you in the company of people whose math is sufficient to ignore poor grades otherwise.

Post reply on HN