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.
... 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.
What pisses me off is how all of my well-written summaries get rejected, yet somehow "the Indian math guy" gets through.
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
"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
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.
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.
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_
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.
"Indian self-taught math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan" works for me.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
[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.
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.