[ExI] Ramanujan

[Bryan Bishop]

On Saturday 01 March 2008, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Nonetheless, from reading Robert Kanigel's "The Man Who Knew
> Infinity" ---the best single biography I ever read---I think that
> Hardy was understating Ramanujan's religious beliefs, attitudes, and
> practices.

I never did read Kanigel's book all the way through (got distracted 
with "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" half way through, you see), but I 
did pick up a few interesting quotes which I think illustrate some of 
the transhumanist mindset, for example:

> His work was the work from which most of us would shrink. There's
> admiration there, but maybe a wisp of derision, too--as if in wonder 
> that Ramanujan, of all people, could stoop so willingly to the realm 
> of the merely arithmetical. And yet, Ramanujan was doing what great 
> artists always do--diving into his material. He was building an 
> intimacy with numbers, for the same reason that the painter lingers 
> over the mixing of his paints, or the musician endlessly practices his 
> scales. And his insight profited. For him, it wasn't what his equation 
> stood for that mattered, but the equation itself, as pattern and form. 
> And his pleasure lay not in finding in it a numerical answer, but from 
> turning it upside down and inside out, seeing in it new possibilities, 
> playing with it as the poet does words and images, the artist color 
> and line, the philosopher ideas. Ramanujan's world was one in which 
> numbers had properties built into them. Chemistry students learn the 
> properties of the various elements, the positions in the periodic 
> table they occupy, the classes to which they belong, and just how 
> their chemical properties arise from their atomic structure. Numbers, 
> too, have properties which place them in distinct classes and 
> categories. Ramanujan was an artist. And numbers--and the mathematical 
> language expressing their relationship--were his medium ... 
> Ramanujan's was no cool, steady Intelligence, solemnly applied to the 
> problem at hand; he was all energy, animation, force. He had a 
> determination to succeed and to sacrifice everything in the attempt. 
> That could be a prescription for an unhappy life; certainly for a life 
> out of balance, sneering at timidity and restraint. Sometimes, as 
> Ramanujan sat or squatted on the pial, he'd look up to watch the 
> children playing in the street with what one neighbor remembered as 'a 
> blank and vacant look.' But inside, he was on fire.                           

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/