Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
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Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
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Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#2Interesting read, The title should have 2015 in it though.
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#3The taxi cab story is easily a top-5 math story, and is quintessential Ramanujan.
Has there been a genius of his kind since? Maybe Terry Tao, but his work also lacks the ease and lack of machinery that Ramanujan had. Truly amazing.
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#4He credited his work to his family goddess. From wikipedia:
"A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. "An equation for me has no meaning," he once said, "unless it expresses a thought of God.""
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#5Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10518452
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#6Interesting read, The title should have 2015 in it though.
Added. Thanks!
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#7Great read! When you first hear the taxicab number story, your initial impression is to be struck by Ramanujan's innate calculating capability. It's interesting to find out that the real coincidence here is that Hardy rode in a taxicab whose number had happened to show up in Ramanujan's investigations of Fermat's last theorem.
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#8Great read! When you first hear the taxicab number story, your initial impression is to be struck by Ramanujan's innate calculating capability. It's interesting to find out that the real coincidence here is that Hardy rode in a taxicab whose number had happened to show up in Ramanujan's investigations of Fermat's last theorem.
A lot of genius stories are like this. I was also under the illusion that these guys could just do things that fast, but at some point, I read Feynman's biography where he explicitly talks about how he used to solve homework problems or something beforehand and then he used to pretend that he found the solution while solving it if his classmates asked.
That threw me for a loop and I started believing shit like no one's smarter than I was etc. Then I just ... grew up, I guess. And I remembered this story by Feynman and I realised that despite his absolutely undoubtable genius, he'd have appeared godlike to me if I was his classmate back in the day.
Ramanujan's brain worked even faster by most accounts. He dreamed in math, I think. So there are multiple stories where people ask him a puzzle and he'll answer with an equation that solves it for the entire family of problems that the puzzle could come from.
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#9He credited his work to his family goddess. From wikipedia: "A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. "An equation for me has no meaning," he once said, "unless it expresses a thought of God.""
Mathematics are the best expression of the transcendental divine. Pythagoras and Plato had the same perspective.
Re: Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)
#10The taxi cab story is easily a top-5 math story, and is quintessential Ramanujan. Has there been a genius of his kind since? Maybe Terry Tao, but his work also lacks the ease and lack of machinery that Ramanujan had. Truly amazing.
Yes definitely: Alexandre Grothendieck.
And Terrence Tao can’t sit at his table (yet?).
But honestly it’s kind of a silly game to rank mathematicians this way.