{"id":21555,"date":"2024-10-26T04:19:55","date_gmt":"2024-10-26T04:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/?p=21555"},"modified":"2024-10-26T04:19:56","modified_gmt":"2024-10-26T04:19:56","slug":"math-is-still-catching-up-to-the-mysterious-genius-of-srinivasa-ramanujan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2024\/10\/26\/math-is-still-catching-up-to-the-mysterious-genius-of-srinivasa-ramanujan\/","title":{"rendered":"Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

UNITED STATES, October 21, 2024 (Quanta Magazine): One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada leapt onto his desk and started dancing. He wasn\u2019t alone: Some of the graduate students who shared his Paris office were there, too. But he didn\u2019t care. The mathematician realized that he could finally confirm a sneaking suspicion he\u2019d first had while writing his doctoral dissertation, which he\u2019d finished a few months earlier. He\u2019d been studying special points, called singularities, where curves cross themselves or come to sharp turns. Now he had unexpectedly found what he\u2019d been looking for, a way to prove that these singularities had a surprisingly deep underlying structure. Hidden within that structure were mysterious mathematical statements first written down a century earlier by a young Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had come to him in a dream.

Ramanujan brings life to the myth of the self-taught genius. He grew up poor and uneducated and did much of his research while isolated in southern India, barely able to afford food. In 1912, when he was 24, he began to send a series of letters to prominent mathematicians. These were mostly ignored, but one recipient, the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, corresponded with Ramanujan for a year and eventually persuaded him to come to England, smoothing the way with the colonial bureaucracies. It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths \u2014 could access entire worlds \u2014 that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results, often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had been bestowed on him by the Gods. More than 100 years later, mathematicians are still trying to catch up to Ramanujan\u2019s divine genius, as his visions appear again and again in disparate corners of the world of mathematics.

Much more on Ramanujan\u2019s life and mathematical prowess in this lengthy article at source.
https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-genius-math-is-still-catching-up-20241021\/
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