Slashdot Mirror
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."
That Ramanujan is refered to as `that Indian math guy'...
I thought this was news for nerds, sure maybe not everyone knows who Ramanujan was, but a good proportion should, at least enough that you don't have to demean him with a vague description.
My thoughts exactly. I wonder, will the next article about relativity reference "some German physics guy"? Or, for that matter, should we be on the lookout for articles about an operating system software codes invented by a Finlandish computer guy?
--MarkusQ
The original post is horrible, it makes it out that he was some kind of idiot savant - he worked with Hardy at Trinity, and, if he hadn't died so young, could have gone on to who knows what else.
The summary didn't name Karl Mahlburg, the subject of the article, either.
Or his mother cooked for him, and later his wife cooked for him.
sig
... that Ramanujan gets referred to on slashdot as the "Indian math guy" and is followed by jokes on outsourcing. You can read about him at http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Ramanuja n.html
or read the book "The Man who knew infinity" by Robert Kanigel.
He had remarkable contributions in number theory, all made
with very little formal training. His story cannot be explained
in any other way but supreme in-born genius (he himself explained it by inspiration from the goddess Namagiri).
The attitude to math in the general populace is one of total
avoidance. I had hopes that the average slashdotter was different.
Maybe it's time that we pulled in Indian editors to /., perhaps they could help push quality up a notch.
My thoughts exactly. I wonder, will the next article about relativity reference "some German physics guy"? Or, for that matter, should we be on the lookout for articles about an operating system software codes invented by a Finlandish computer guy?
I think it was a reference to the Bill Nye story posted earlier. Poor taste, maybe, but will everybody stop being offended all PC like?
I think it was a reference to the Bill Nye story posted earlier. I doubt it. Submissions usually sit in the queue for a day or two before being accepted (or rejected). Besides, since the submittors have no control over when their stories are posted, it'd be pretty stupid to try to reference an earlier story without an explicit link, wouldn't it?
What pisses me off is how all of my well-written summaries get rejected, yet somehow "the Indian math guy" gets through.
Actually there is some argument as to what he died from. It may have been from a parasitic liver infection. Also he died in India after he returned in 1919, not in England.
That's not the point. He is a person. He did something important. He has a name. He is NOT "the Indian math guy".
Ramanujan was one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of the 20th century. there are some people on./ who could do with some basic education.
When I was a PhD math student, I often annoyed professors by asking them about real-world applications, and usually got vague answers like the one quoted.
Well, then don't go to the Pure Math department when you're asking questions about Applied Math! Don't go to the C&O department, and ask about Statistics, and don't go the Actuary Science department, and ask about Accounting! Yes, they're all within the Math Faculty, but you have to pick your department correctly, or you won't get the answers you want! Sheesh! You wouldn't go to a French professor, and get all annoyed that they didn't speak ancient greek, would you? They're in the Arts Faculty, but Ancient Greek belongs to the Classical Studies department, and French belongs to Romance Languages department.
There is a lot of mathematics out there with real world applications: modeling for physics and engineering, non-linear statistical methods for stock market analysis, all sorts of new crypographic methods and applications, graphical rendering engines; tons of stuff.
Typically, pure math is far in advance of real-world applications: most of the mathematics we use today had no "real world" application when it was first concieved of. Field theory was considered "useless" when it was created, but it forms the heart of both modern cryptography, and of error correcting codes. These two, in turn, have become crucial to the success of our banking and telecommunications industries.
New insights into eliptic curves are yielding a new form of cryptography; the discrete logarithm problem forms the basis of another. Ten years ago, quantum computing was a matter of purely speculative mathematics; today, it exists as an experimental science.
Imaginary numbers were so named because no one figured they had real world uses: today, they're taught as a practical matter for electrical engineers to use in their electronics calculations. Taylor series approximations take the guesswork out of sin and cosine calculations, polynomial interpolation techniques allows computation of a "curve of best fit" for arbitrary scientific data, and every modern engineer is now aquainted with Fourier's transform. Some of Benoit Mandlebrot's notions about fractals were used to create JPEG compression, in common use on the Internet. Wavelet theory is currently being developed to attempt to improve on current methods.
Math is pushing ahead very fast; the real reason you don't usually see it is because it's often right at the heart of things; deep inside our hashing algorithms, hidden in a cryptography library, working behind the scenes as the statistical underpinnings of a successful greylist design that keeps spam away. It's in the boolean algebras that were used to design an efficient circuit layout, and in the iterative methods used to compute a new airfoil design. It's everywhere.
--
AC
Any slashdot cyrpto gurus want to take a stab as to what implications this has for cryptogrphy and factoring large numbers?
Agreed. Anyone who takes the time to study the Quaran in its fullness must conclude that Islam is evil to the core.
Please note I said Islam, not Muslims. They are generally decieved by promises of peace from the false god Allah. This is not a licence for genocide or racial discrimination.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"All you've learned was that Ceasar was a salad dressing dude."
and:
"If I was a short French dude from the past where would I go?"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Well, then don't go to the Pure Math department when you're asking questions about Applied Math!
The question to pure mathies might have been phrased: "What have the Applied Math people done with your past discoveries in this sub-field?" In the case of number theory and other discrete fields of study (pardon the pun), discoveries have so often led to something or other regarding cryptography or cryptanalysis or both.
NOT in the same league as Einstein or Linus Torvalds
Funny that your parochial flamebait happens to be true. Ramanujan was definitively smarter than either of them.
Not to put down Big Al, but he only had a small armful of memorable discoveries spread over the decades of his career. OTOH, Ramanujan pumped out astonishingly brilliant stuff pretty much every day of his sadly brief adult life.
It appears to me that Ramanujan's name was left out purposely to help understanding and spark interest.
/. readers who care who'd care would know exactly who was meant. And for those who didn't know about Ramanujan, "a self-taught math genius from India" was more informative and more memorable than just the name.
/. is a little low on reading comprehension skills and misses things like this.
Most
Also, the fact that the link to the bio was included seems to indicate that "anonymous reader" does know and care who "the Indian math guy" was.
I apologize in advance for the following rant:
The sad thing is that much of readership of
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I could not agree more.
Mathematics at this level, in my naive opinion, is almost an art form, in that it uses unscientific methods to reach scientifically provable results. And in so doing, it reveals volumes about the method of knowledge.
I've spent countless hours playing with calculators watching for patterns. I once worked at a job that left me sitting at a desk for hours with nothing to do but think, and playing with numbers never failed to fill the time with amusing discoveries of how numbers could produce unexpected symmetries and results.
While I did quite well in prep school in mathematics, my love for mathematical symmetry morphed to the study of music theory in college (the two are not as dissimilar as most would think).
There are beauties to be found in numbers, in pure mathematics. It is nothing short of the study of the world around us as expressed in purely intellectual form. At the highest level, I would not be surprised if the observations turn inward toward the observer, if the discoveries tell us more about how intellect works as it understands quantization than about the actual numbers at play.
This "Indian math guy" would have been one hell of a guy to have dinner with. What I'd do to be inside his mind for just a short time!
Don't mock or belittle that which you don't understand. To do so often reveals more about yourself than you probably want revealed.
From the writeup I know know that "some Indian math guy" did something about "how numbers can be created by adding other numbers".
News for nerds indeed. The man is one of the most well-known mathematicians there is (as much as a mathematician can be well known). The guy even has a number named after him, 1729.
That article also has a lot of fun Futurama references too.
That said, my guess is that the poster had copied the URL of the story and couldn't remember how to spell Ramanujan, and just used some shorthand which came off as a slight where one wasn't intended. The myriad of inevitable offshoring jokes are much more offensive than the (correct if somewhat lame) description of Ramanujan as an "Indian math guy."
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
>It appears to me that Ramanujan's name was left out purposely to help understanding and spark interest.
Thats like saying when someone types in all capitals its purposefully to help understanding and spark interest.
You don't say "That MIT guy" or "That English guy in the wheelchair" just to help understanding. It verges on the disrepectful.
If you want to spark interest do it on his work/his merit. Not on his nationality.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
To demonstrate the ability to have nearly the exact same summary, without the dumbing down I present you an alternative, the extra two words bolded for emphasis.
By the same token, "German guess guy" is Heisenberg, "Italian nuke guy" is Fermi and "Slashdot condescension guy" is whoever bespoke "Indian math guy," referring to Ramanujan. Mathematics, made of pure thought, advances meteorically faster than the dull material world, let alone the moral, spiritual or (shall we call a spade a spade?) ethological world of semi-sentient apes and slash dotters. Ramanujan lived in a future virtually all of us cannot even imagine, and his name is revered, not because we understand him, but because he thought the future beautiful.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
So why do a PhD in maths? If he wants to study applications, he should be doing a PhD in an applied subject. If he wants to study applications of mathematics, maybe he should be doing Physics or CompSci or something.
Maths at a PhD level is very pure. Anyone wanting applications probably shouldn't be doing it.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
I don't understand why Pakistan is "glued" to India whenever the word India is mentioned. Though we are similar looking people, we just don't have anything in common. Except the skin colour, we have absolutely nothing in common. We are very very different from the Pakistanis.
Not to put down Big Al, but he only had a small armful of memorable discoveries spread over the decades of his career.
;)
Only on Slashdot would there be a dude who argues that _Einstein's_ number of discoveries was mediocre
Relative to other geniuses, of course... *ow!*
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
What's up with that? So they only have names when they're American scientists? Do you know how much Srinivasa Ramanujam contributed to math??? Just because YOU don't know them does NOT make them any less deserving of the respect they SHOULD get from everyone for their contribution to the field!! Or are you just another one of those hicks who respects people based on their nationality and on rubbish like "if i don't know them, they're not worth knowing"?
Have some decency. Recognize genius and respect it. What have you accomplished? Even 1/10th of what any respected scientist has? Don't you expect people to call you by your name and not "hey you"? Why not give the same respect to others?
I'm also surprised that the Slashdot editors let this story be published without correcting it!! What, are story submissions now governed by a perl script?
RANT OFF.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Even if Bose had only one good idea, he still did better than most of us. Plus a good teacher, especially in the 'hard' subjects, isn't to be sneered at eigther. Not that you seemed to be putting him down.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
"Indian self-taught math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan" works for me.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
You know, the thing about that is... it did spark my interest, and I'd like to learn more (I've never heard of the guy), so I clicked through the links, but there wasn't much meat there. So I clicked back and decided to look through the comments to see if there were any good links on Ramanujan's theorem's suggested by /. readers. Now, here I am, three-fourths of the way down the page, having scrolled through nothing but "you're a racist". "No I'm not". "Yes you are". "Are not". "Are so". Sigh... guess I'll have to bite the bullet and do my own research.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
[Gets out bullhorn:]
It is very obvious that the submitter was CONSCIOUSLY referring to Ramanujan as "some Indian guy or something, Idontrememberhisname" in a tounge-in-cheek way, a technique frequently used by those of us who possess an actual sense of humor. Please do not be alarmed or otherwise let this information affect your propensity for righteous indignation in the future. That is all.
I fully agree with you. Some "Indian math Guy" who is self-taught has a tone of prejudice in it. First, that he is some obscure Indian, not Ramanujan as one of the major contributors to number theory in his times. Second, some Indian math guy and self-taught seem to indicate that as if it was an accidental achievement, otherwise how can a well-educated discover something important? Slashdot needs a replacement, soon.
Instead of looking at the original post in such a negative way, perhaps you could see the reference to him being self-taught in a positive light. That a self-taught mathematician discovered something that all the PhD's and the like before him didn't is rather impressive. Perhaps it's not Slashdot that needs replacing, but the attitudes of some of it's readers.
You don't have an optimal solution to compress a single message:
.) for 0 and a long signal (dash -) for 1. Translate my example to this scheme and we get:
.- = 11
.5*1 + .25 *2 + .125*3 + .125*3 = 1.75 bits per 2 bits sent
If I say nothing, assume 00
If I say 0, assume 01
If I say 1, assume 10
If I say 01, assume 11
Assuming a uniform distribution of the message, you can expect 1 bit of data to be transmitted.
However, this is a fake example. Given an information channel I need to define lots of things like what I am using to represent 0 and 1 and how often signals are expected.
Say I have a telegraph wire. Each second I transmit a short signal (dot
nothing nothing = 00
. nothing = 01
- nothing = 10
Notice that I am really using 3 symbols for each signal. 3 symbols = log2(3) bits = 1.58 bits. I am using 2 symbols per message so I am sending a 2 bit message in just over 3 bits.
Your example is the same:
0 == 00,
01 == 01,
10 == 10,
1 == 11
I receive a 0, should I complete the message or wait for a 1? How long should I wait? The answer to that sets the baud (symbol rate). If you wait and don't receive a 1 then you have received and 'empty' symbol (or end-of-file if you want to call it that). You encoding scheme is basically the same as my 'fake' one above.
If the messages you want to transmit (say 00, 01, 10, 11) all appear with the same regularity then you cannot compress the signal stream. However, if some of the bit pairs appear more often then we can use something like Huffman encoding to get a better bit count:
00 - 50%
01 - 25%
10 - 12.5%
11 - 12.5%
00 = 0
01 = 10
10 = 110
11 = 111
So a message like
00 01 00 10 11
would be
0100110111
I am pretty sure this is unambiguous.
This encoding scheme gives us an average bit count of:
We can use entropy calculations to determine how much real information we would be getting in the original stream:
-0.5*log2(0.5) - 0.25*log2(0.25) - 2*0.125*log2(0.125) = 1.75 bits
Since the transmitted bit rate is the same as the message entropy the encoding scheme is optimal.
"What a complete joke of a post, rape as a punishment? What are you waffling about? Are you so blind that you believe everything you hear on TV?"
What does TV have to do with this? I read this from Pakistani sources. Even the Pakistani "patriot" who posted the parent item knows about it.
"Obviously, there is a war going on with the Muslims right now, obviously, negative propaganda about them will be encouraged."
"Propaganda" defined by you as information you don't like and would want to keep secret.
"I remember studying British Propaganda about the Germans in World War 2"
And I remember studying the Crimean war. But what does either entirely irrelevant situation have to do with anything? Oh wait. Your example is connected a little: like WW2 Germany, Pakistan is governed by a military dictatorship that has a foreign policy goal of exterminating Jews (they do not recognize the rights of Israelis to exist). It is not anywhere near as bad as Nazi Germany, but it is rather antisemitic.
"Not to mention the fake Iraqis overturning incubators"
What were these fake Iraqis really, once you took their "Iraqi costumes" off. Were they Bildeburger agitprop agents? Or was it Mossad guys?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If you took number theory or some high level mathematics courses and never heard about Srinivasa Ramanujan it would be akin to studying relativistic physics and never hearing about Albert Einstein
Not true. I am a math PhD, but none of my profs ever mentioned Ramanujan to me. Hofstadter's Gödel-Escher-Bach devotes a chapter to Ramanujan, as do several other other popular science books, but it is more for the good story than for his actual merits.
Becoming a grandmaster requires talent and guidance. Ramanujan had great talent but no proper guidance and as a result the product of his tragic life is mostly curiosities and anecdotes. He has some good results, but there is no comparison between him and people like Pierre Fermat or Albert Einstein who single-handedly created new branches of science.