Ramanujan the Improbable Life and Thesis

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He was miserably poor. ... He opened his book and began to explain some of his discoveries. I saw quite at once that there was something out of the way; but my knowledge did not permit me to judge whether he talked sense or nonsense. ... I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted a pittance to live on so that he might pursue his researches" (O'Connor & Robertson, 1)

As history returns to Ramanujan's ideas and finds accuracy in most of them, Rao's response would demonstrate the degree to which the young man's internal insights had somehow transcended those of the best math minds amongst his predecessors and contemporaries. So would this be demonstrated in his trigonometric principles, such as that which is commonly referred to as the Ramanujan Conjecture. This is stated as "an assertion on the size of the tau function, which has as generating function the discriminant modular form ?(q), a typical cusp form in the theory of modular forms. It was finally proven in 1973, as a consequence of Pierre Deligne's proof of the Weil conjectures." (Wikipedia, 1) That it was proven so many years after his death is suggestive of the power of his ideas, which were formed into theories as a precursor to many complex ideas considered knowledge today.

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From an educational perspective, there is value to Ramanujan's story for primary school, even if many of his mathematical principles are investigated more appropriately in the university and graduate school settings. This is because the narrative of his life is so compelling as a demonstration of that which can be accomplished against a host of insurmountable odds, not the least of which is the unfortunately short frame of time in which Ramanujan was able to make his mark. Though his arguments and ideas preceded the whole host or revelations yielded in 20th century science, it is nonetheless true that many of his ideas are held within the framework of such evolving discussions as that on string theory, a progressive argument concerning the dimensional structure of the universe. To the point, the importance of Ramanujan's accomplishments is overshadowed only by the fact that he did this without the educational formality or material comfort that might seem to us necessary for success.

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