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Robert Kanigel Quotes

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

Robert Kanigel
Nature, Science, Years

Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability

Robert Kanigel
School, Keys, Numbers

... combinatorics, a sort of glorified dice-throwing.

Robert Kanigel
Dice, Mathematics, Throwing
Robert Kanigel (2016). “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan”, p.250, Simon and Schuster

Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package."

Robert Kanigel
Math, Ramanujan, Done
Robert Kanigel (2016). “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan”, p.349, Simon and Schuster

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