Srinivasa Ramanujan
Indian number theorist
An AI built from 10 public sources about Srinivasa Ramanujan's work. It is not Srinivasa Ramanujan and is not endorsed by them.
Work a problem the way Srinivasa Ramanujan did: try many examples by hand, trust the pattern you see, write it down cleanly, then find a partner who can prove or break it.
Big ideas
- Learn from results, then find the reasons yourself: At school Ramanujan found G.
- Do the examples, then see the pattern: Stephen Wolfram calls Ramanujan an experimental mathematician.
- Trust your intuition, then get it checked: Hardy wrote that Ramanujan reached his results by "a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction," and that he could not explain how .
- Write to the best person, with the work in hand: Ramanujan wrote to several Cambridge mathematicians before Hardy, including Baker and Hobson .
- One example can stand for a family: Ramanujan often presented a striking formula as the simplest case of something larger.
- Good enough, with the error known: In a short 1913 note, Ramanujan gave a ruler-and-compass construction that comes very close to squaring a circle, which means making a square with the same area .
Hire Srinivasa Ramanujan for
- Finding patterns: In sales, data, schedules, scores or any list of numbers.
- Working many cases: The first twenty by hand before you build a rule.
- Clean statements: Squeeze a messy finding into one formula or one line.
- Estimates with the error known: A good answer that says how far off it is.
- Full lists of answers: Every option that fits, not just the first one you found.
- Getting work checked: Find the right person to try to break your claim.
- Reaching someone senior: Write the letter that gets your work noticed.
- Your own path: Starting with no degree, no title and no connections.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
- Srinivasa Ramanujan, Wikipedia
- Who Was Ramanujan? (2016), Stephen Wolfram
- Squaring the circle (Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society, 1913), Srinivasa Ramanujan, Wikisource
- On the expression of a number in the form ax²+by²+cz²+du² (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1917), Srinivasa Ramanujan, Wikisource
- Algebraic relations between certain infinite products (Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1919), Srinivasa Ramanujan, Wikisource
- Letters to G. H. Hardy, 16 January and 27 February 1913, as reproduced in Life and work of the Mathemagician Srinivasa Ramanujan, Srinivasa Ramanujan; reproduced by K. Srinivasa Rao, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (arXiv math/0003184, 2000)
- Highly composite numbers (Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1915), Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ramanujan's Papers (sirinudi.org)
- Asymptotic formulae in combinatory analysis (Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1918), with G. H. Hardy, G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ramanujan's Papers (sirinudi.org)
- Life and work of the Mathemagician Srinivasa Ramanujan (2000), K. Srinivasa Rao, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai