Monday, December 22, 2008

Ramanujan: The Man who knew Infinity


Today is the 121 Birth Anniversary of Srinivas Ramanujan,a famous Indian Mathematician,who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis,number theory,infinite series and continued fractions.Recently his contributions have found applications in crystallography and string theory.

In the memory of Ramanujan, Tamil Nadu every year celebrates 22 December as 'State IT Day'. His contributions to Mathematics are well known.The contribution of G.H. Hardy a famous mathematician is also equally important, but when some body asked him what was his biggest contribution to Mathematics, Hardy told, Ramanujan was his biggest contribution to Mathematics,such was the genius of Ramanujan.


Here is his brief Profile.

Profile

Born : 22 Dec 1887
Died : 26 April 1920
Birth Place : Erode, Tamil Nadu, India

Contributions to Mathematics :

1. Landau- Ramanujan Constant
2. Mock Theta Fuction
3. Ramanujan Prime
4. Ramanujan - Soldner Constant
5. Rogers- Ramanujan Identities

Applications of his contributions :

1. Crystallography
2. String Theory

I wrote this post to pay tribute to him & his genius.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

excluding this..

Giving an exclusive formula to calculate Pi digits easliy, which modern day computer uses it...

Lets see the
Counter attack:-

1)Ramanujan's work mainly concerned with Pure applied math, like finding square roots, squaring a circle,work related to trigonometric functions..etc.

2) if he is so great then why didn't he try to solve at least one problem from the famous 23 Hilbert problems.

3)what about solutions to
Navier-stokes equations?

4)what about Poincare conjecture ?

5)what about Riemann hypothesis ?

6)what about solutions to non-linear PDE's?

7)what about Euclid's fifth postulate ?

8)what about Fermat's little theorem?

9)what about Fermat's last theorem ?

10)Godel's completeness theorem.

enough..., need any more..?

Rating on a Hardy scale as 100/100 that doesn't mean he's so great,

Hardy himself didn't contribute anything great to math .

I hope in my belief, he's(Hardy) just a strict professor who think student's don't know anything until they taught by them.

There are some great men who turned the course of human history entirely with their theories, some of them are

1)Khwarizmi- the basic Algegra,the symbols we use [ +, /, x, - ] concept of zero, functions,first algorithm.

2) Bernard Riemann -elliptic Geometry

3) Bolyai- hyperbolic geometry

4) Lobachevsky-hyperbolic geometry

5) Euler : -
- concept of 'e'
- complex numbers (i^2 = -1)
- e^ix = cosx + i sinx

6) Hilbert- vector algebra (complete a-z hypothesis of it)

7) what a prism to optics is,

"Fourier's work is same to signal analysis"

the lossy '.jpg' is based up on his Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT)

8) Lorentz, Poincare, Mach, Hermann Minkowski..etc

" They laid the very roots of relativity concepts" all the tools Einstein needed to frame Special Relativity; manifolds,metric, tensors, differential geometry, Continuum calculus..etc.

{ Don't forget that @ the time Einstein produced 3 papers in 1905
he's working in SWISS PATENT OFFICE. there's very high probability that he may be copied all that what he want & arranged in a good manner and produced to us his sh*t,if he(Einstein) is so genius then he him self didn't succeeded to give solution to his field equations and in formulating Grand Unification theory too.
(EM + gravitation }

9)Andrew wiles- Proof to Fermat's last theorem
[ a^n + b^n = c^n ;where n is integer and n>2 ] proof(1995) using elliptic curve

10)the CAD software you people use
" it's root math(Linear algebra + multivariate calculus ) is From Galerkin,Hrennikoff,& Richard Couran5)

my fingers are paining me, and this last line.

For there are 2 types of mathematicians
1) mathematician by Birth
2) mathematician by worth

I hope Ramanujan is first category
that doesn't mean he's all time great.

any counters..?

Subhradip said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Subhradip said...

hey Nimo
Reading your comment(which I felt I wasted my precious time in doing it), I wonder that perhaps people like you are grave danger to science with some wiki or goggle gathered knowledge.
You will need atleast 12 life time to know the dimensions of Ramanujan's work. Coming to some to your points.. why Ramanujan didn't solve Fermat's last theorem or Poincare conjecture etc...let me reply in short by saying this.. Why didnot Einstein discovered Electromagnetism? Why didn't Feynman discover Photoelectric effect, why didn't Abdul Salam discover wave equation? that means, by your distorted viewpoint that Einstein, or Feynman or Dr Salam are all third grade scientist !! right.Hey nimo, you know what? Yoichiro Nambu(2008 Noble Physics) didn't solved P vs NP problem... so Prof Nambu is a poor physicts(by the same argument of Ramanujan right !)
I don't know what more to say, but just one advice.. STOP commenting.

Everyone mentioned here are extraordinary in their OWN area of expertise.. that's where there are pillars of knowledge.. one single person cannot solve all problems in the world !! To know what Ramanujan did for Mathematics, talk sometimes to a string theorist, to a cosmologist, to a mathematical physicist or to a computer scientist... you will know yourself.. Rama is a genius ! just we are too small to even gauge a tiny part of his contribution.. leave alone all his work. Peoples get their PhD in solving and validating Ramanujan's equations that he used to mentally calculate in his scrap books!

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

@nimo

Ramanujan contributed much more than just the pi formula, he contributed nearly 4000 theorems.

His modular functions find applications with the string theory and crystal theory.

His partition formula was used by Neils Bohr to uncover the atom.

His theorems find countless applications everywhere in number theory, computer science, and physics.

As for why he didn't try to solve mathematical problems it's because he had no college education and died early at age 32. I'm sure if he had proper education, and wasn't suffering from malnutrition or vitamin deficiencies he would've contributed much more and would've solved some mathematical problems.

Khwarizmi used the work of Indian mathematicians Brahmagupta and Aryabhatta BTW and Brahmagupta accomplished much more than Khwarizmi, Aryabhatta was the first to solve equations using general methods, not Khwarizmi

Unknown said...

Also to note most of Ramanujan's works are so original almost all discoveries connected to Ramanujan's theorems would've never made without Ramanujan. Mathematicians today have difficulty proving his theorems and study his journals. The more theorems available the easier it is to find proofs of other things, so Ramanujan's nearly 4000 theorems are extremely significant.

Ramanujan contributed nearly 4000 theorems, also well as Landau–Ramanujan constant, Mock theta functions, Ramanujan conjecture, Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan–Soldner constant, Ramanujan theta function, Ramanujan's sum, Rogers–Ramanujan identities

The theorems Ramanujan came up with are not simple things, originated independently in Ramanujan's mind, and are the marks of a true genius.