13 ms·

Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), mathematician

263 points by mgdo 8y ago

sbradford26 8y ago
His life story is incredibly interesting. I also think that it is a lesson to us all that someone doesn't have to be formally trained in a field to make major contributions to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
- s_dev 8y ago
  > I also think that it is a lesson to us all that someone doesn't have to be formally trained in a field to make major contributions to it. I don't think it serves that lesson at all but rather an extraordinary minority of very talented indidvuals can bypass such training/education in extremely rare circumstances. He's a Mozart and education and training is still necessary for the vast majority of people.
  - gp7 8y ago
    Mozart had extensive education and training????
    - s_dev 8y ago
      Nope -- he was a prodigy from the earliest age. He was composing music at the age of 5. Thats kindergarten. You might be thinking of other composers who are regarded as his equals -- Mozarts brain was just tuned for music in a way ours are not.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - yesenadam 8y ago
        He was composing music at the age of 5. I would have been composing at 5 had my father been a musician/composer/teacher! (I did start piano at 4, in a not-particularly-musical household) As it was, I remember hearing that when I was about 9, and thought "Oh well, it's too late for me" - which is a shame! But his first compositions weren't great. You write that like it's some super-human feat or something. "he was a prodigy from the earliest age. ... Mozarts brain was just tuned for music in a way ours are not." I don't know why people talk like that. Maybe as an excuse for not achieving great things themselves, or even having to try. There was a Hungarian guy who decided to train his 3 daughters to be chess players, to see just how good they could be given a proper training. The 2nd strongest sister became world champion. The strongest one never played in women-only events, she was too strong, and turned out to be the strongest woman chess player of all time, by a long way. (i.e. Susan and Judit Polgar) I don't think it was because their brains were 'tuned for it'. They just had the perfect environment.
        emodendroket 8y ago
        But again, many people have ideal environments and don't make it; others have environments far from ideal and do.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        lake99 8y ago
        Another example, this[1] music producer's kid developed perfect pitch despite the lack of any training. He was exposed to a rich variety of complex music right from the start. When the dad discovered his son's ability, he found out that the kid had his own names for the notes. IIRC, based on which song begins with that note. I think it's quite likely that if the dad had spent all his days composing music, the son would have been doing that from an early age as well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
        s_dev 8y ago
        Heres another way to test your hypothesis that Mozarts genius can be credited to his training and advantage of a musically literate family. If we applied the same training and familial advantage to many kids would any of them turn out like Mozart? I'd argue they probably wouldn't because his brain was fundamentally different and that made the difference. If he didn't have those advantages would he have been discovered as a prodigy as quickly and as early? Maybe not.
      - canhascodez 8y ago
        Is music composition difficult? Are most five-year-olds asked or encouraged to write music? Is this something that most adults have attempted and failed to do? Do you think that you could write a piece of music if you had time and inclination? I'm asking honestly, because I'm pretty sure that I'm not having a typical life experience. Personally, I don't really bother to listen to music, because music is never further away than wanting to hear a melody. It's something to do on the bus, or when my mind is otherwise unoccupied. One starts with a note or a scale, finds a 'lick' in it, develops it into a theme or refrain, introduces a counterpoint or noodles around through the keys a bit, and eventually we work around to a restatement or finale (or get bored or forgetful in the middle). I suspect that this is easier for me than others, but I don't think that I'm any kind of musical genius. I'm at least hoping that creating music is more of a normal part of the human condition than not, at any rate.
      - SimbaOnSteroids 8y ago
        Tbf, his compositions at 5 were and still are dreadful.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - sbradford26 8y ago
    I agree that education/training is required for most everyone. But there are times that these minorities could contribute a lot but how certain industries/fields are structured they are shut out.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    What strange ideas people have about Mozart and genius. Everyone is bad when they start doing anything. They gradually get better by putting in countless hours. I'm not a Mozart expert, but I know his father and sister were musicians, so his education and training would have started extremely young. You'll find a similar thing with most prodigies. Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan , it sounds like he was obsessed with maths from the age of 10 or so. He learned from books. Sounds like by the time he got to college, what he was interested in wasn't taught there anyway; he was already too advanced/specialized. His story seems to me a sad one, so often sick, dying only 6 years after arriving in England, at 32, etc.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- mayankkaizen 8y ago
  His life was interesting, but in tragic ways. It is true that he went on to do crazy mathematics without any formal education but we really don't know what he could have achieved if he were well versed in contemporary mathematics or even had access to some advance textbooks. It is also true, per se, that you don't have to be formally trained to make major contribution but I guess this really doesn't apply to Ramanujan. Being formally trained is one thing and being completely untrained is another. He didn't even have access to decent textbooks. He was starving. He had no mentor. It was his sheer genius which played a key role. Given his circumstances, I don't think any other ordinary person could achieve that much with any amount of hard work.
  - larryfreeman 8y ago
    Interesting viewpoint of the life of genius. I just read a book (Peak, 2016) on deliberate practice where there is compelling evidence that all works of genius stem from very hard work and lots of time. Is it possible that Ramanujan would not have been so successful had he followed the standard learning path? Is it possible that Ramanujan's genius stems from a "genius" of what mathematical questions he chose to think about?
    - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
      His genius stems from mathematical intuition. Even without formal education, he implicitly understood certain topics and was deriving proofs based on that intuition. Not everyone has that innately, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be learned.
    - Brockenstein 8y ago
      >Is it possible that Ramanujan would not have been so successful had he followed the standard learning path? Sure, it's possible. But there's always a problem when you teach yourself something, no matter how good at it you are, in that you don't know what you don't know. Even if you're a genius and an autodidact, sometimes a little direction, a little mentoring, a little collaboration goes a long way in moving your understanding down the field. Here's the biggest problem with a lack of education as far as math goes. How much time did he spend re-inventing the wheel because he didn't know which wheels had been invented? And he always did it better and faster than anyone else would have, or did? Probably not. His genius may have minimized the handicap of a lack of education. I somehow doubt that lack of an education was a benefit to him. Once he got into academia though through his recognized genius he probably learned a lot of things from a lot of people to try and fill in whatever gaps in his understanding he may have had. I very much doubt he lamented how learning things from experienced peers crippled his own genius... No one is such a genius that they're an island unto themselves and no one and nothing any other human being has done matters. That type of genius is fantasy for Hollywood, not reality. No matter who we are, or the level of our genius. We all stand on the shoulders of giants who came before.
gjm11 8y ago
It may be worth clarifying that this isn't "papers of" as in "scholarly publications in journals by", but as in "pieces of paper associated with"; these are nice high-resolution scans of a box of papers at Trinity College, Cambridge relating to Ramanujan. Letters between other mathematicians about Ramanujan's work; some handwritten manuscripts by Ramanujan himself (including the famous "Lost Notebook"); a passport photo of Ramanujan. Definitely interesting for Ramanujan enthusiasts, but if you're looking for (say) his papers with Hardy about partitions, numbers of prime factors of "typical" numbers, etc., then this isn't the place to go.
- theoh 8y ago
  It's a standard expression. Googling the phrase "papers of" brings up mostly hits for archives of documents with the description "Papers of <name>" where <name> is someone noteworthy.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Unfortunately with mathematicians and scientists the term "paper" is overloaded because they write academic papers, which leads to ambiguity.
emodendroket 8y ago
There are millions of people who have done a lot of piano practice since they were young; how many of them are comparable talents to Mozart? The whole 10,000 hours thing is overhyped. For every Wayne Gretzky there's countless other kids just as obsessed with hockey who were not good enough for the NHL.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yesenadam 8y ago
  I didn't know anything about Wayne Gretzy so I looked him up.. Started at 2, trained with siblings by father on home hockey rink.. But sure, not everybody can be No. 1, it would be silly to expect millions of 'talents comparable to Mozart', there can't be countless people in the NHL etc. So... you sound disappointed, maybe. Did you put in '10,000 hours' and it didn't work out? I don't know much about the '10,000 hours' theory, less about how you think it's overhyped. People often have an idea that it's an unpleasant ordeal, all that practice, but if it's what you love, it's a pleasure. (I enjoyed every minute) Sure, I believe people have different levels of..how far they can go, but its importance is vastly overrated. Like much more important to me seems how much you enjoy practising, whether art, music, sport, anything, whether you love doing it more than anything, and do it for decades. I've often thought that if I'd grown up living in a town, a popular kid etc I would have turned out 'untalented' in anything, except chatting and being popular; but I grew up fairly isolated on a farm, pre-internet, and so played piano a lot, read a lot etc. And I wasn't so happy, so playing piano was a great joy. Maybe if I'd been happy already, I wouldn't have 'needed' to play piano so much. I had very low self-esteem...thanks to bullying at home and at school, so...it was wonderful to escape to the beautiful world of music. I think factors like that, that influence how much you practice, how many hours you put in (though I never thought of it like that), how much you love doing it, are much more important than differences of natural ability.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    I'm not disappointed; I'm just tired of reading overly-reductive accounts that talk about how all that matters is practice and anybody can be God's gift to music if only they'd work hard enough at it. Ten thousand hours is a concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and he has a whole spiel about how anybody who was as excited about hockey as Wayne Gretzky could have been just as good. My hobby these days is playing Tekken, which I guess is similar enough to piano in that you can practice forever and you've never totally mastered it.
calhoun137 8y ago
I recently started working through his collected papers a few months ago and have a really nice hardcover. Wow they are so hard!! Also have read every volume of his lost notebooks back in college. Sometimes when I start a new paper I think: why would anyone ever think of that, who cares anyway, and what does that even mean. It takes about 10 minutes to read one line. But its worth it cause he was able to create his own path and what he does with formal power series and summing divergent series is staggering to behold
wrong_variable 8y ago
Ramanujan was born too early. I wish he was alive in today's independent and richer india, he could have achieved so much more.
- adamc 8y ago
  And yet, we are all born in just the right moment. Just by existing, Ramanujan opened eyes as to what people from "backward" (colonial) areas were capable of. While his own life might have been better if he had been born now, his existence helped improve many other lives. Just reading about him as a kid inspired me. And I'm just a white dude from the suburbs.
rofo1 8y ago
I recommend reading "The Man Who Knew Infinity". It's really devastating the way he died. It seems that a lot of math geniuses died premature. Eisenstein, Abel, Galois, Riemann.. I've read some of his work.. there are formulas appearing out of nowhere, like magic. He said that he saw them in his dreams. He had access to 1 book, basically, a collection of math theorems and that's it. Only 900 pages (IIRC) and the rest of the stuff he discovered (and re-discovered in some cases) on his own. Unparalleled genius!
happy-go-lucky 8y ago
Ramanujan did what made him happy. He was good at what he did. Maybe he was so absorbed in his work that he hadn't had time to think about his circumstances. He was a natural.
WhitneyLand 8y ago
This is fantastic, I’m going to choose something that would make a nice large print to frame for a wall in my house. A trend on home improvement shows is to print out old patent drawings and hang them as decoration. It always seemed so off putting necause most people never bothered to choose based on work that was intesterimg or meaningful to them, or even know what the patent was about. For me this feels the opposite, so many personal connections...The subject matter, respect for his talent and contributions, the person, and in huge part the inspiration of being to achieve in the face of long odds and adversity.
TallGuyShort 8y ago
I actually just read a bit about him in Matt Parker's "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension", which I highly recommend. I've always enjoyed math and long regretted not taking more math classes for fun at university, and this is a really fun tour to lots of aspects of math I haven't had occasion to think about much before, including some of Srinivasa's talents for number theory.
jzl 8y ago
Something that can't be said about very many people -- Ramanujan has an integer named after him: 1729. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number) This is hands-down my favorite math story: It is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number, after an anecdote of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy when he visited Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in hospital. He related their conversation: I remember once going to see him when he was 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 unfavourable 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."
- 1024core 8y ago
  Of course, it has to be the Hardy-Ramanujan number....
- escherplex 8y ago
  Remember 1729 being referenced in the 2015 film The Man Who Knew Infinity which was essentially a Hardy retrospective on his relationship with Ramanujan. YouTube actually has a 25 sec. clip of that scene from the movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4y6uFdcOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4y6uFdcOM
  - glandium 8y ago
    And the corresponding Numberphile video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjaDKVC4iY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjaDKVC4iY
abc_lisper 8y ago
Before you make grand suggestions of what his genius could be, you would be well-afforded to read this http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/

263 points by mgdo 8y ago

His life story is incredibly interesting. I also think that it is a lesson to us all that someone doesn't have to be formally trained in a field to make major contributions to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

s_dev 8y ago
> I also think that it is a lesson to us all that someone doesn't have to be formally trained in a field to make major contributions to it. I don't think it serves that lesson at all but rather an extraordinary minority of very talented indidvuals can bypass such training/education in extremely rare circumstances. He's a Mozart and education and training is still necessary for the vast majority of people.
- gp7 8y ago
  Mozart had extensive education and training????
  - s_dev 8y ago
    Nope -- he was a prodigy from the earliest age. He was composing music at the age of 5. Thats kindergarten. You might be thinking of other composers who are regarded as his equals -- Mozarts brain was just tuned for music in a way ours are not.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - yesenadam 8y ago
      He was composing music at the age of 5. I would have been composing at 5 had my father been a musician/composer/teacher! (I did start piano at 4, in a not-particularly-musical household) As it was, I remember hearing that when I was about 9, and thought "Oh well, it's too late for me" - which is a shame! But his first compositions weren't great. You write that like it's some super-human feat or something. "he was a prodigy from the earliest age. ... Mozarts brain was just tuned for music in a way ours are not." I don't know why people talk like that. Maybe as an excuse for not achieving great things themselves, or even having to try. There was a Hungarian guy who decided to train his 3 daughters to be chess players, to see just how good they could be given a proper training. The 2nd strongest sister became world champion. The strongest one never played in women-only events, she was too strong, and turned out to be the strongest woman chess player of all time, by a long way. (i.e. Susan and Judit Polgar) I don't think it was because their brains were 'tuned for it'. They just had the perfect environment.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        But again, many people have ideal environments and don't make it; others have environments far from ideal and do.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - lake99 8y ago
        Another example, this[1] music producer's kid developed perfect pitch despite the lack of any training. He was exposed to a rich variety of complex music right from the start. When the dad discovered his son's ability, he found out that the kid had his own names for the notes. IIRC, based on which song begins with that note. I think it's quite likely that if the dad had spent all his days composing music, the son would have been doing that from an early age as well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
      - s_dev 8y ago
        Heres another way to test your hypothesis that Mozarts genius can be credited to his training and advantage of a musically literate family. If we applied the same training and familial advantage to many kids would any of them turn out like Mozart? I'd argue they probably wouldn't because his brain was fundamentally different and that made the difference. If he didn't have those advantages would he have been discovered as a prodigy as quickly and as early? Maybe not.
    - canhascodez 8y ago
      Is music composition difficult? Are most five-year-olds asked or encouraged to write music? Is this something that most adults have attempted and failed to do? Do you think that you could write a piece of music if you had time and inclination? I'm asking honestly, because I'm pretty sure that I'm not having a typical life experience. Personally, I don't really bother to listen to music, because music is never further away than wanting to hear a melody. It's something to do on the bus, or when my mind is otherwise unoccupied. One starts with a note or a scale, finds a 'lick' in it, develops it into a theme or refrain, introduces a counterpoint or noodles around through the keys a bit, and eventually we work around to a restatement or finale (or get bored or forgetful in the middle). I suspect that this is easier for me than others, but I don't think that I'm any kind of musical genius. I'm at least hoping that creating music is more of a normal part of the human condition than not, at any rate.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 8y ago
      Tbf, his compositions at 5 were and still are dreadful.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- sbradford26 8y ago
  I agree that education/training is required for most everyone. But there are times that these minorities could contribute a lot but how certain industries/fields are structured they are shut out.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yesenadam 8y ago
  What strange ideas people have about Mozart and genius. Everyone is bad when they start doing anything. They gradually get better by putting in countless hours. I'm not a Mozart expert, but I know his father and sister were musicians, so his education and training would have started extremely young. You'll find a similar thing with most prodigies. Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan , it sounds like he was obsessed with maths from the age of 10 or so. He learned from books. Sounds like by the time he got to college, what he was interested in wasn't taught there anyway; he was already too advanced/specialized. His story seems to me a sad one, so often sick, dying only 6 years after arriving in England, at 32, etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mayankkaizen 8y ago
His life was interesting, but in tragic ways. It is true that he went on to do crazy mathematics without any formal education but we really don't know what he could have achieved if he were well versed in contemporary mathematics or even had access to some advance textbooks. It is also true, per se, that you don't have to be formally trained to make major contribution but I guess this really doesn't apply to Ramanujan. Being formally trained is one thing and being completely untrained is another. He didn't even have access to decent textbooks. He was starving. He had no mentor. It was his sheer genius which played a key role. Given his circumstances, I don't think any other ordinary person could achieve that much with any amount of hard work.
- larryfreeman 8y ago
  Interesting viewpoint of the life of genius. I just read a book (Peak, 2016) on deliberate practice where there is compelling evidence that all works of genius stem from very hard work and lots of time. Is it possible that Ramanujan would not have been so successful had he followed the standard learning path? Is it possible that Ramanujan's genius stems from a "genius" of what mathematical questions he chose to think about?
  - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
    His genius stems from mathematical intuition. Even without formal education, he implicitly understood certain topics and was deriving proofs based on that intuition. Not everyone has that innately, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be learned.
  - Brockenstein 8y ago
    >Is it possible that Ramanujan would not have been so successful had he followed the standard learning path? Sure, it's possible. But there's always a problem when you teach yourself something, no matter how good at it you are, in that you don't know what you don't know. Even if you're a genius and an autodidact, sometimes a little direction, a little mentoring, a little collaboration goes a long way in moving your understanding down the field. Here's the biggest problem with a lack of education as far as math goes. How much time did he spend re-inventing the wheel because he didn't know which wheels had been invented? And he always did it better and faster than anyone else would have, or did? Probably not. His genius may have minimized the handicap of a lack of education. I somehow doubt that lack of an education was a benefit to him. Once he got into academia though through his recognized genius he probably learned a lot of things from a lot of people to try and fill in whatever gaps in his understanding he may have had. I very much doubt he lamented how learning things from experienced peers crippled his own genius... No one is such a genius that they're an island unto themselves and no one and nothing any other human being has done matters. That type of genius is fantasy for Hollywood, not reality. No matter who we are, or the level of our genius. We all stand on the shoulders of giants who came before.

gjm11 8y ago

It may be worth clarifying that this isn't "papers of" as in "scholarly publications in journals by", but as in "pieces of paper associated with"; these are nice high-resolution scans of a box of papers at Trinity College, Cambridge relating to Ramanujan. Letters between other mathematicians about Ramanujan's work; some handwritten manuscripts by Ramanujan himself (including the famous "Lost Notebook"); a passport photo of Ramanujan. Definitely interesting for Ramanujan enthusiasts, but if you're looking for (say) his papers with Hardy about partitions, numbers of prime factors of "typical" numbers, etc., then this isn't the place to go.

theoh 8y ago
It's a standard expression. Googling the phrase "papers of" brings up mostly hits for archives of documents with the description "Papers of <name>" where <name> is someone noteworthy.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Unfortunately with mathematicians and scientists the term "paper" is overloaded because they write academic papers, which leads to ambiguity.

emodendroket 8y ago

There are millions of people who have done a lot of piano practice since they were young; how many of them are comparable talents to Mozart? The whole 10,000 hours thing is overhyped. For every Wayne Gretzky there's countless other kids just as obsessed with hockey who were not good enough for the NHL.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yesenadam 8y ago
I didn't know anything about Wayne Gretzy so I looked him up.. Started at 2, trained with siblings by father on home hockey rink.. But sure, not everybody can be No. 1, it would be silly to expect millions of 'talents comparable to Mozart', there can't be countless people in the NHL etc. So... you sound disappointed, maybe. Did you put in '10,000 hours' and it didn't work out? I don't know much about the '10,000 hours' theory, less about how you think it's overhyped. People often have an idea that it's an unpleasant ordeal, all that practice, but if it's what you love, it's a pleasure. (I enjoyed every minute) Sure, I believe people have different levels of..how far they can go, but its importance is vastly overrated. Like much more important to me seems how much you enjoy practising, whether art, music, sport, anything, whether you love doing it more than anything, and do it for decades. I've often thought that if I'd grown up living in a town, a popular kid etc I would have turned out 'untalented' in anything, except chatting and being popular; but I grew up fairly isolated on a farm, pre-internet, and so played piano a lot, read a lot etc. And I wasn't so happy, so playing piano was a great joy. Maybe if I'd been happy already, I wouldn't have 'needed' to play piano so much. I had very low self-esteem...thanks to bullying at home and at school, so...it was wonderful to escape to the beautiful world of music. I think factors like that, that influence how much you practice, how many hours you put in (though I never thought of it like that), how much you love doing it, are much more important than differences of natural ability.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I'm not disappointed; I'm just tired of reading overly-reductive accounts that talk about how all that matters is practice and anybody can be God's gift to music if only they'd work hard enough at it. Ten thousand hours is a concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and he has a whole spiel about how anybody who was as excited about hockey as Wayne Gretzky could have been just as good. My hobby these days is playing Tekken, which I guess is similar enough to piano in that you can practice forever and you've never totally mastered it.

calhoun137 8y ago

I recently started working through his collected papers a few months ago and have a really nice hardcover. Wow they are so hard!! Also have read every volume of his lost notebooks back in college. Sometimes when I start a new paper I think: why would anyone ever think of that, who cares anyway, and what does that even mean. It takes about 10 minutes to read one line. But its worth it cause he was able to create his own path and what he does with formal power series and summing divergent series is staggering to behold

wrong_variable 8y ago

Ramanujan was born too early. I wish he was alive in today's independent and richer india, he could have achieved so much more.

adamc 8y ago
And yet, we are all born in just the right moment. Just by existing, Ramanujan opened eyes as to what people from "backward" (colonial) areas were capable of. While his own life might have been better if he had been born now, his existence helped improve many other lives. Just reading about him as a kid inspired me. And I'm just a white dude from the suburbs.

rofo1 8y ago

I recommend reading "The Man Who Knew Infinity". It's really devastating the way he died. It seems that a lot of math geniuses died premature. Eisenstein, Abel, Galois, Riemann.. I've read some of his work.. there are formulas appearing out of nowhere, like magic. He said that he saw them in his dreams. He had access to 1 book, basically, a collection of math theorems and that's it. Only 900 pages (IIRC) and the rest of the stuff he discovered (and re-discovered in some cases) on his own. Unparalleled genius!

happy-go-lucky 8y ago

Ramanujan did what made him happy. He was good at what he did. Maybe he was so absorbed in his work that he hadn't had time to think about his circumstances. He was a natural.

WhitneyLand 8y ago

This is fantastic, I’m going to choose something that would make a nice large print to frame for a wall in my house. A trend on home improvement shows is to print out old patent drawings and hang them as decoration. It always seemed so off putting necause most people never bothered to choose based on work that was intesterimg or meaningful to them, or even know what the patent was about. For me this feels the opposite, so many personal connections...The subject matter, respect for his talent and contributions, the person, and in huge part the inspiration of being to achieve in the face of long odds and adversity.

TallGuyShort 8y ago

I actually just read a bit about him in Matt Parker's "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension", which I highly recommend. I've always enjoyed math and long regretted not taking more math classes for fun at university, and this is a really fun tour to lots of aspects of math I haven't had occasion to think about much before, including some of Srinivasa's talents for number theory.

jzl 8y ago

Something that can't be said about very many people -- Ramanujan has an integer named after him: 1729. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number) This is hands-down my favorite math story: It is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number, after an anecdote of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy when he visited Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in hospital. He related their conversation: I remember once going to see him when he was 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 unfavourable 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."

1024core 8y ago
Of course, it has to be the Hardy-Ramanujan number....
escherplex 8y ago
Remember 1729 being referenced in the 2015 film The Man Who Knew Infinity which was essentially a Hardy retrospective on his relationship with Ramanujan. YouTube actually has a 25 sec. clip of that scene from the movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4y6uFdcOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4y6uFdcOM
- glandium 8y ago
  And the corresponding Numberphile video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjaDKVC4iY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjaDKVC4iY

abc_lisper 8y ago

Before you make grand suggestions of what his genius could be, you would be well-afforded to read this http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/