Re: Why are Asians so good at math?

On 23 Feb 2006 21:17:52 -0500, hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman
Rubin) wrote:


Ramanujan has been called by some the greatest of all time.
He had, I believe, one year of college. Mathematicians
are still working on proving what he wrote in his notebooks.
He died of tuberculosis at an early age.


In this time and day and with ready resources like WIKIPEDIA it should
be easy enough to get right to the source thus

Srinivasa Ramanujan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan
RamanujanSrinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan (Tamil: ????????? ????????
?????????) (December 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920) was a world-renowned
Indian mathematician and one of the most esoteric mathematical
geniuses in the twentieth century. Nicknamed as "the man who knew
infinity", who had uncanny mathematical manipulative abilities. He
excelled in number theory and modular functions. He also made
significant contributions to the development of partition functions
and summation formulas involving constants such as p. A child prodigy,
he was largely self-taught in mathematics and had compiled over 3,000
theorems by the year 1914 when he moved to Cambridge. Often, his
formulas were stated without proof and were only later proven to be
true. His results have inspired a large amount of research and
mathematical papers. In 1997 the Ramanujan Journal was launched to
publish work "in areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan".

I saw a PBS show on Ramanujan some ten years ago. There was an
interview with his wife whom he did not bring with him to Cambridge.
[A digression. A Brahmin, Ramanujan had dietary restrictions. Without
a wife to prepare his special food and he was too poor to hire help,
he was often sick and probably slowly died of malnutrition.] Anyway
on PBS this poor woman spoke of her cold empty arranged marriage. She
would rattle on non stop in a real whinny voice of a typical old
Indian nag, a good reason why R did not bring her along. I am being
unkind. I apologize. Anyway when she zipped past on something like a
ten sentence tirade I remarked to my son, "Good lord, she did that in
a single breath!" To this day my son remembers his rolling on the
floor.
.

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