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Classic Math Puzzle Cracked
An anonymous reader writes "This is cool - if mind-bending. A century ago, a self-taught math genius from India noticed some patterns in how numbers can be created by adding other numbers. Now a grad student has finished the job showing that the patterns apply to all prime numbers, not just some. There's more on the Indian math guy here."
Let's not use real names or give any credit to some guy.
The Indian mathematician outsourced this to a US grad student
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
a self-taught math genius from India noticed some patterns in how numbers can be created by adding other numbers.
yeah, I saw that too. Like, how if you have a 4, and add a 1, you get a 5. It's pretty cool.
"We would not have expected that the crank would have been the right answer to so many of these congruence theorems"
ah crank.. is there anything it cant do?
"Na-hee, na-na-jar. Na-hee-na-na-jar.
It's not that difficult."
"Yeah, well at least your name isn't Michael Bolton."
... if you'd posted anonymously.
Infuriate left and right
"how numbers can be created by adding other numbers"... that sounds more like the observation of an American presidency guy.
This reminds me of that movie, you know? The one about that guy that did stuff?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"A decade ago, a self-taught computer genius from Finland [...] There's more on the Finish computer guy here."
(I think you get the point)
I'm surprised we got as much detail! Should be something like "Some smart guy from a long time ago did some smart things, and now some other smart guy made them better..." Duuuuuh, that's what *I* got my degree for!
I heard Iceland just granted citizenship to some American chess player or something. He's also suing the U.S. for some reason.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
Long live Finlandia!
As a math graduate student student I was invited to watch the presentations of the people applying for a graduate faculty position at the university. I was only able to make it to one of the presentations, but it was an unforgetable experience for me.
The applicant gave a very interesting presentation. I got lost during the first 5 minutes when he was still giving background, but it was still interesting. His presentation was on - assuming that I remember any of the very little that I may have understood - some specific behaviors of the infinite boundaries of n-dimensional manifolds.
The best part was when he said, "In case you think that this is just esoteric and 'out there,' I want you to know that this stuff has real applications in topology."
There were about 6 other grad students and 15 math faculty there and I think I was the only one to notice how funny that was, so I'm sorry if you don't get the joke.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
If they can catch the dupes, mispellings, and other obvious errors, I'm all for outsourcing slashdot.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Obilgatory story (Score:5, Interesting)
by uniqueCondition (769252) on Tuesday March 22, @07:45PM (#12018209)
GH Hardy (he wrote A Mathematician's Apology) speaking of Ramanujan:
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
(London 1940).
A funny co-incidence happened about 10 years ago that brought this story to mind when I moved back from A2 to Detroit. Our new phone number ended in 1729. Of course my GF complained that it would be hard to remember since it was such an un-interesting phone number!
All the nerds with jobs will be there, those in the US will be burger flippers (*) or on the street, and Slashdot's future audience will be over in India.
This will in turn reduce productivity in India so much that America becomes competitive again! Brilliant!
sudo ergo sum