David Meyer on Nostr: One of my favorite mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, was born #onthisday in 1887 ...

One of my favorite mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, was born #onthisday in 1887 [1]. Ramanujan had many important and fascinating results in number theory including his famous formula for π shown below. There is also the Hardy–Ramanujan number, 1729, and the wonderful story that goes along with it [2].

Ramanujan has so many important results that would be hard to list even a small fraction of them here. That said, one of my favorite Ramanujan results concerns what are called "continued fractions" and is known as the Rogers–Ramanujan continued fraction [3]. A few of my notes on Ramanujan and nested radicals are here: https://davidmeyer.github.io/qc/nested_radicals.pdf. The LaTeX source is here: https://www.overleaf.com/read/qwhvvhrzrgct. As always, questions/comments/corrections/* greatly appreciated.

There is also a nice movie about Ramanujan's life called "The Man Who Knew Infinity" [4]. Burkard Polster (aka Mathologer) has many interesting videos about Ramanujan and his results, e.g. [5].

Sadly Ramanujan died of tuberculosis in 1920 at the young age of 32.

Read more about Ramanujan's life and times here: https://royalsociety.org/blog/2018/10/revisiting-ramanujan.

[Right image credit: https://in.pinterest.com/SHUBHAMRAJ54/srinivasa-ramanujan]

References
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[1] "Srinivasa Ramanujan", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

[2] "1729_(number)", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number)

[3] "Rogers–Ramanujan continued fraction", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers%E2%80%93Ramanujan_continued_fraction

[4] "The Man Who Knew Infinity", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity

[5] "Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co.", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw

#ramanujan #nestedradicals #math #maths #mathematics