Ramanujan's Deathbed Conjecture Finally Proven

jomama717 writes "Another chapter in the fascinating life of Srinivasa Ramanujan appears to be complete: 'While on his death bed, the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan cryptically wrote down functions he said came to him in dreams, with a hunch about how they behaved. Now 100 years later, researchers say they've proved he was right. "We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years," Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said. Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician born in a rural village in South India, spent so much time thinking about math that he flunked out of college in India twice, Ono said.'"

Comments

Re:Flunked out of college twice

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably a lot of pot.

Re:Guy was so smart it's scary.

[korgitser]

Actually, Newton was an alchemist foremost. He only did physics and calculus to help with his alchemy.
And no, alchemy was not the crackpot gold-seeking they teach it was in history class. Promises of gold were and still are what gets you the funding. Alchemy was a larger discipline concerned with truth about the world, a kind of philosophy 2.0 that finally recognized the need for empirical data and experiment; the most advanced worldview up to that point. Later, as it progressed, physics and chemistry were branched out from it, other parts merged into medicine, philosophy and humanities.

Re:He tapped on to his full potential

[MightyMartian]

There's no way to know because he's dead, but there's certainly a body of evidence suggesting neurological differences between genius level mathemetic prodigies to suggest that a poor young man from an Indian village who literally taught himself 100 years worth of mathematics was in possession of cognitive abilities beyond the average person's.

The amount of grey matter is an obscenely crude way to measure intelligence. What I find interesting is your need to make the man average and ordinary. Does the possibility that some have greater cognitive capacity than others bother you?