Ship of Fools: Mysterious math functions solved

Thread: Mysterious math functions solved Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

Indian Mathematician Proved right after 90 Years.
Pretty cool stuff.

Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :

That's fascinating, lilBuddha, but can you give us some guidance on the conversation you would like to have here?

Remember, this is a discussion forum! [Smile]

jedijudy
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Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

Sorry. [Hot and Hormonal]

Right. As my maths are not near to that level, but how about the death bed revelation, how far ahead of his time he was, the level of genius it requires to make such jumps. Any run-of-the-mill smart person can make a stab at understanding Einstein, but how many could jump as far as he? This man was one such. More rare than hen's teeth I would say. All of that I find fascinating and worthy of discussion.

Posted by churchgeek (# 5557) on :

I couldn't read the whole article because that page for some reason hung up my computer (I'm at work on my lunch break). But I did notice that he "thought about math so much" he flunked out of college twice! Uh huh. He was thinking about math too much.

It's interesting how the brain works. Clearly, his was working something out subconsciously. We already know that this is fairly common, and it's why "sleeping on it" or taking a break often help us solve problems. Fascinating!

Posted by Garasu (# 17152) on :

I got crashed out at work too.

Clearly the Powers That Be(TM) don't want us to find out about mathematics...

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

...or they ant you to sleep on it and work it out for yourself.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Garasu:
I got crashed out at work too.

Clearly the Powers That Be(TM) don't want us to find out about mathematics...

If I were paranoid I'd suggest the last thing the PTB want is people working out for themselves what the PTB know - and a bit more besides!

Apart from getting clean, I find the shower is useful for insights. That scalp rubbing must help.

Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on :

quote:
Originally posted by churchgeek:
It's interesting how the brain works. Clearly, his was working something out subconsciously. We already know that this is fairly common, and it's why "sleeping on it" or taking a break often help us solve problems. Fascinating!

A common joke in the maths world is that a mathematician is someone who comes home, lays on the bed, turns the lights out and starts work.

Interestingly Ramanujan tended to come up with assertions, not proofs. And sometimes they were wrong though he did have a high success rate. Apart from the profound ones some were simple formulae such as those here which are a little suspect: de-nesting radicals is complicated but producing new example is much easier (in the same way it's easier to make up a cryptic cross word clue than to solve).

That it took so long to prove this particular result is impressive. Though of course there are lots of older unproved conjectures. For some reason the most commonly quoted is Goldbach's Conjecture: every even number greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes in at least one way. Eg 118 = 101+17. Prove that and Mr Goldbach will be forgotten and mathematicians will have to find a new conjecture that can be explained to non mathematicians. There is something called the generalized Fermat problem, like the familiar 'last problem' but more so.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

I'm not at all sure that dreams are "unconscious" or " subconscious" in any literal way. Just usually forgotten, which is not quite the same thing. I'm pretty sure I am conscious while asleep, but there is a sort of moving window of memory so when I wake up I only recall the last few seconds or at the most minutes of whatever I was thinking/dreaming about. Sometimes that doesn't work and I remember hours of being asleep and dreaming - last night was one such, not that my rather weird and mildly unpleasant dream was anything like as interesting as Ramanujan's functions.

But then Ramanujan was famously weird. I thought this might be about him when I opened the thread.

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