Four score and seven years ago (not really), there was a man named Ramanujan
Ramanujan, 1729, & why math is a lot more interesting when it stops feeling like homework and starts feeling like you're uncovering something that was already there.
there was some guy called Ramanujan, eighty years and seven years ago
not that there was.
he was born in 1887, which is thirteen years before Lincoln was elected president and so we might already see the figures being mangled even at the beginning.
i am rereading things about Srinivasa Ramanujan & i just do not see how someone can be able to do this & then resume with their regular math homework, whether its calc i / ii, or precalc, or trig, or a-level maths, whatever it is you're taking.
there is a difference between being good at math & being able to just randomly observe an integer & have it tell you interesting things about it.
one of the common examples is 1729.
Hardy arrives at Ramanujan's hospital room and says that the number on the taxi he took was 1729 and that he found it to be pretty unimpressive.
Ramanujan replies that, on the contrary, it is a very interesting number as it is the smallest number that can be expressed as a sum of two positive cubes in two different ways.
1 cubed plust 12 cubed.
nine cubed plus ten cubed.
same number.
i do not really care about the number 1729, that is not the point.
the point is that Hardy encounters a taxi number and Ramanujan notices that.
that is absurd.
there is this weird pedagogy that is sometimes applied to math in which it is presented as though every single thing humanity has thought of has been written down and now you just have to slowly be shown the answers.
here is the formula.
here is what the variables stand for.
do questions 1 to 27 but only the odd numbered ones.
that is why math feels so dead, because it is largely presented as though it is all been done already, even if it hasn't truly been finished.
there are still things we do not know.
it is been checked with the power of computers an unreasonable number of times, but we still have not proved some of these patterns.
some of these patterns seem to be fifteen minutes' worth of work but end up haunting people for their entire lives.
Ramanujan is the anti-climax of math.
he writes down identities and expressions with little to no explanation, sometimes not providing proof at all, and people are mystified because then it takes them years to figure out why those things are actually true.
imagine having to prove some identity that Ramanujan wrote down and realizing that he is dead and you are just trying to prove something he already knew.
i'd be angry.
the cool part about it all is that he actually did not have the proper background everyone else had for being one of the most famous mathematicians to ever live.
he was largely self-taught, got so caught up in math that it hurt his performance elsewhere, and filled notebooks with things that people are even now trying to understand.
he died at 32.
thirty-two.
i am having trouble thinking about which of the two facts is more incredible: that he managed to produce so much math in such a short window or that some of his notebooks still contained things that people were puzzling over even long after his death.
probably both.
that is also why i like math outside of an academic setting.
you can just take some random problem that seems silly and no one has really cared about and run with it.
this sequence does so because
what?
what is there to explain about prime numbers?
what would happen if i write a program and run it on the first hundred million integers?
does this pattern hold?
can i exploit it?
and sometimes you get to be surprised when the computer says yes a million times and math says cool, prove it.
i love that.
not the crunching of numbers.
or having to remember what identity corresponds to what test.
the idea that there is structure to numbers that has always been there even if no one has ever thought of it until now.
the year 1729 predates Ramanujan's birth.
the decomposition into cubes was always there.
no one invented it, he just noticed it.
that might be the coolest part about math.
sometimes you feel like you are not creating something, but uncovering something that was always there.
maybe i'm just high & rambling, or perhaps there's some truth to this, who knows? this cart really does slap though :p
shoutout cali clear
ok i may be getting sidetracked a bit
this is practically 785 words, a 9th grade highschool essay at this point ha
goodbye, for now