For more than three thousand years, mathematics has played an important role in Indian culture. Sometimes it was studied for practical reasons and sometimes for pure intellectual delight. The earliest traces of mathematics are found in the Indus Valley, around 3000 BC. There is clear evidence of a structured system of weights and measures and … Continue reading The Rich Legacy of Indian Mathematics
Tag: Ramanujan
Discoveries by Amateurs and Distractions by Cranks
Do amateurs ever solve outstanding mathematical problems? Professional mathematicians are aware that almost every new idea they have about a mathematical problem has already occurred to others. Any really new idea must have some feature that explains why no one has thought of it before [TM155 or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com]. It is both difficult and … Continue reading Discoveries by Amateurs and Distractions by Cranks
Ramanujan’s Astonishing Knowledge of 1729
Question: What is the connection between Ramanujan's number 1729 and Fermat's Last Theorem? For the answer, read on. The story of how Srinivasa Ramanujan responded to G. H. Hardy's comment on the number of a taxi is familiar to all mathematicians. With the recent appearance of the film The Man who Knew Infinity, this curious … Continue reading Ramanujan’s Astonishing Knowledge of 1729
Waring’s Problem & Lagrange’s Four-Square Theorem
$latex \displaystyle \mathrm{num}\ = \square+\square+\square+\square &fg=000000$ Introduction We are all familiar with the problem of splitting numbers into products of primes. This process is called factorisation. The problem of expressing numbers as sums of smaller numbers has also been studied in great depth. We call such a decomposition a partition. The Indian mathematician Ramanujan proved … Continue reading Waring’s Problem & Lagrange’s Four-Square Theorem
Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook
In the Irish Times column this week ( TM010 ), we tell how a collection of papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan turned up in the Wren Library in Cambridge and set the mathematical world ablaze. Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887—1920) Ramanujan was one of the greatest mathematical geniuses ever to emerge from India. Born into a poor Brahmin … Continue reading Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook
ThatsMaths 