pi

i interrupt the history of my life and bring things back to the present...
just the other day, I was reading this excerpt of a letter from Srinivasa Ramanujan to GH Hardy... what struck me is not the mathematics (I cdnt figure out most of the arcane stuff) but the touching simplicity.....

I always found the story of Ramanujan inspiring and tragic... there is something quite romantic in a story of impoverished genius flourishing despite all odds....

Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling."
Srinivasa Ramanujam's opening lines from his letter to G H Hardy.

anyway, I noticed this interesting piece of trivia...in most households (tamil at least), mothers tend to force feed ladysfinger to kids, saying that it makes them "brainy"....[i know at least 3-4 of my friends saying that it happened to them as well]....only later, when I was reading the biography of Ramanujan, I learnt that his favorite dish was made of ladysfinger...

who knows, this somehow passed into urban legend and made its way into my life as an old wives' tale...

One of my teachers said that Ramanujan's book was full of equations like these, all of them without proof. Only very recently, with increased computing power and new algorithmic techniques, we are able to provide proofs for some of those equations. Of course many of them are still unproven.

Legend has it that there was one equation written down in his book, which was scratched out... as if he had initially thought it correct, and later dismissed as inaccurate. The really interesting thing is that when mathematicians tried plugging in values for the variables in the equation, the equation was always true..this they tried for quite a lot of values and the equation always held...some of them started thinking that maybe Ramanujan was wrong to think that the equation was incorrect... When they went through the results once again, they realized that they had made a calculation error in one of the test cases, and there was an imbalance in the equation after all... in the thousandths' decimal place...

did Ramanujan actually realize this when he wrote it down? pretty awesome stuff, if you like that sort of thing.