[ExI] Ramanujan

[Lee Corbin]

Bryan writes

> 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:

All that (below) just seems really like anyone who loves his
work, or is highly fascinated by something. There is nothing
characteristically transhumanist (or even philosophical) that
I can see.

Lee

>> 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
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> Bryan Bishop
> http://heybryan.org/
>