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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.'"
Obsessed, and smart.
He had a mathematician's mind, sure. Probably not much brighter than what we consider reasonably bright and particularly attuned for maths. But what he had that sets us apart, was a raging obsession. The kind of demon that consumed Newton and possessed him to calculate pages of logarithms and Tesla to study from dusk 'til dawn and further, without respite.
I wonder what would happen if US colleges (or even earlier in our educational system) let students have free reign, and really specialize. If over in India this man had been nurtured in college, and allowed to stay in math courses (or even better conduct his own lines of study), might he have had a more enjoyable or productive life? If we recognize genius and cultivate it, what might grow in that garden?
Ramanujan is a totally different ball game. Completely self thought, from a book of identities and formulae. He found a sort of Cliff notes for the BA in Math in England. He assumed that is the way to present mathematics. Just the final result without any deriviation or proof. Did not know what was already invented and well known. He reinvented the wheel so to speak so many times. Almost all the major math break throughs of the previous century, he reinvented all over again, independently. Think about it. One century of mathematicians original work completely reinvented by this lone clerk toiling away in colonial India working as a harbor master's assistant. He presented his inventions without any proof or even a hint of how it was arrived at. Most of his first letters were rejected as some crackpot's ravings by math professors in England. Hardy was the only one who saw that among all the well known identities, that were being presented as new inventions, were real gems never seen before. He invited Ramanujan to England and the rest was history.
A special tit bit: BTW he and I both have the same ancestral temple, that of Lord Oppiliappan at Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, but his favorite god was not Oppiliappan, but Nama Giri Devi, the ancestral god of his mother's family. I wish we were related. His personal life was very sad. Died at age 30. His wife was left as a destitute and ended up working as house maid.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The summary is actually referring to other conjectures from his notebooks and other notes, not 'the' Ramanujan conjecture as proved by Deligne, so the summary is not really incorrect, just misleading. It should be noted that these other conjectures are in fact not unusually important and certainly not even close to the Weil conjectures, but are nevertheless interesting.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
FCKGW 09F9 42
noodles?
rewriting history since 2109
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?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Probably not much brighter than what we consider reasonably bright and particularly attuned for maths.
Give a reasonably bright math graduate an entire lifetime and he is unlikely to be able to reinvent all the math that Ramanujan reinvented due to not knowing it already existed, nor invent all the new math stuff that Ramanujan came up with. Ramanujan did all that in only 32 years.
The merely obsessive would get stuck in ruts or fruitless paths. Ramanujan came up with tons of stuff.
The way his mind works is pretty different:
He was sharing a room with P. C. Mahalanobis who had a problem, "Imagine that you are on a street with houses marked 1 through n. There is a house in between (x) such that the sum of the house numbers to left of it equals the sum of the house numbers to its right. If n is between 50 and 500, what are n and x?" This is a bivariate problem with multiple solutions. Ramanujan thought about it and gave the answer with a twist: He gave a continued fraction. The unusual part was that it was the solution to the whole class of problems. Mahalanobis was astounded and asked how he did it. "It is simple. The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. Which continued fraction, I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind," Ramanujan replied.
This is not the "normal" savant rapid addition/multiplication sort of stuff.
I have to say that some of the best moments of my life were calculating the area under the curve by tactile measurement.