Mathematician Srinavasa Ramanujan

That Ramanujan may not be a household name – at least in the UK – would be despite the efforts of GH Hardy. Hardy, then Britain’s most famous mathematician, mentored Ramanujan when he was coaxed out of India and into Cambridge’s alien halls of learning in 1914.

Hardy wrote about the experience of working with Ramanujan in his classic exploration of the mind of the working mathematician A Mathematician’s Apology, published in 1940.

Nearly seventy years later, Ramanujan’s reputation received a welcome polish with the 2007 debut of Complicite Theatre’s A Disappearing Number, which The God of Whizz caught during its brief, and acclaimed, London run in September.

The show weaves four parallel lives into a singing, dancing, time-travelling, multimedia exploration of love, longing, and infinite series. The GoW enjoyed himself immensely, and even learned – in a post-show chat with cast and director – how the play’s music and rhythmic chants mirror the mathematical sequences that provided food for Ramanujan’s considerable talents.

Simon Burney, A Disappearing Number‘s writer/director, took his original inspiration from Hardy’s warm account in of his experiences with Ramanujan in the short book A Mathematician’s Apology. Hardy told of his pleasure exploring new avenues of mathematics, and helping the shy vegetarian brahmin adjust to life at cold, carnivorous, wartime Cambridge.

Ramanujan buried himself in his maths whilst with Hardy, to the detriment of his health. He returned to India after the First World War unwell, possibly from a liver infection acquired in Madras. He died in 1919, aged only 32.

There is one very famous anecdote about Ramanujan, re-told in an introduction to Hardy’s book, and referenced in Burney’s play. Hardy, visiting a now very ill Ramanujan in hospital in Putney, had come by taxi, and…:

…went into the room where Ramanujan was lying. Hardy, always inept about introducing a conversation, said, probably without a greeting, and certainly as his first remark: ‘I thought the number of my taxi-cab was 1729. It seemed to me rather a dull number.’ To which Ramanujan replied: ‘No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number. Is is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.’

When I first heard the story I was reminded that some men and women of science truly are in a league of their own, a league the likes of us can only hope to reach.

I have now resolved to read A Mathematician’s Apology, when I’ve got through the five other books I bought in the last month. In the meantime, I can only encourage Maths-Whizzers to catch A Disappearing Number, wherever you are.

Google Celebrates Pi Day

Pi (as any fule kno) describes the relationship between a circle’s radius and its circumference or area, or between a sphere’s radius and its surface area or volume.

If you’re wondering why yesterday could be described as Pi Day, remember that in America Sunday 14th March is written 3/14/2010. The first three digits of the date match those of the magic pi – 3.14159…

Maths-Whizzers can find out how to derive pi for themselves in one of our Year 7 exercises. Check it out here.

If you’re interested in finding out more about our online maths tutor, then head on over to our homepage.

[via Mashable]

Here’s a 9-point mathematical, scientific, and cultural guide to make any day special:

And whilst you’re celebrating the importance of this, or any other, day, sign up to Maths-Whizz, our powerful online maths tutor. With Maths-Whizz, you can cultivate a brain well-prepared for future life and education, and maybe you’ll even be able to predict the next truly special day!

The human brain that lets us add, subtract, read, write, walk and chew gum (sometimes at the same time!) evolved from a brain that had different demands imposed upon it, most of which revolved around staying alive long enough to have offspring. So how have we co-opted brain regions specialised for navigating ancient woodland and savannah into helping us file our tax returns?

As reported in the National Geographic this month, one way is this:

Structures in the human brain once devoted only to visualizing spaces are now also involved in performing simple mental math…

According to the research, it seems the eyes do have it when it comes to reading our inner mathematical thoughts. Researchers have tracked eye-movements and identified the region of the brain that lit up when participants looked left, and the region associated with gazing rightwards.

They then used activity in these brain regions to show that participants tend to process numbers of different sizes as locations in space, an effect snappily titled ‘spatialnumerical association of response codes’, or SNARC. The researchers predict that adders (not those adders) will mentally move their eyes rightward, whilst subtracters move them leftward.

If the predictions hold true, this would reinforce the idea that we think of numbers in spatial ways and that the wonderful flexibility of the brain enables us to handle abstract problems of number and language using older, more concrete mental skills (like figuring out where you are).

Of course, we are often taught maths using spatial concepts – number lines, manipulatives and so forth – and researchers acknowledge that this could be an artefact of the way arithmetic is taught to younger children, as hops along a number line. Adding (or counting on) is a rightward hop, and subtraction (or counting back) a leftward hop. Your eyes might naturally tend in one direction or another, depending on the operation.

Still, the fact that we teach with numbers on lines, or as floors in a building etc, might just be reflections of that innate tendency to ‘see’ numbers in space. It would be interesting to test the authors’ predictions with novice mathematicians and expert ones. If memory serves, university mathematicians start to process numbers as they do language, just as expert musicians make a similar transition. Because simple 2D visualisations aren’t sufficient for thinking about Mandelbrot sets, or Riemannian Geometry the experts may show less of the whole eye-moving effect when thinking about maths.

The bottom line, as it always is, is that Maths-Whizz knows all this. We teach early adding and subtracting with leftward and rightward jumps, and lead students into abstract pencil and paper arithmetic at year 3 by encouraging them to visualise those jumps in blocks according to the numbers’ place value. e.g. 125 + 43 starts at 125, and then jumps 40 to the right, and another smaller jump of 3 more.

This is all par for the course in publishing. No learning materials can be guaranteed perfect, but you’d expect a basic children’s counting book to be pretty much error-free, which is what makes the following quite so baffling and hilarious. [Thanks to FailBlog (Failblog not suitable for children).]

The authors clearly would have benefited from some basic Foundation (Kindergarten)-level online maths tutoring.

Followers of the banking and economic crises will now be well-acquainted with the kind of eye-wateringly large sums of money being lost, earned or moved around in the US and European economies. But there is no harm reminding onself what goes into a very large number, and how you might write it down.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7917357.stm

I’ll dispute his gripe that the Americans ruined our nice system of writing a million million as a billion with their (altogether more sensible) method of multiplying by a thousand. It still doesn’t make a billion any easier to grasp for this tiny brain, but at least the American – and scientific – approach gives us more and more exotic terms to describe financial meltdown. Bring on the quadrillion!

Key Stage 3 Maths-Whizzers will be well on the way to Johnny Ball-esque skills with powers. Whether some of our banking experts ought to be sent back to the School For Large Numbers in order (if nothing else) to help them get to grips with just how much money has been sent swirling down the monetary plughole I leave to others to decide.