Intesresting Fact About Ramanujan
Ramanujan had his interest in mathematics unlocked by a book. It wasn’t by a famous mathematician, and it wasn’t full of the most up-to-date work, either. The book was A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics (1880, revised in 1886), by George Shoobridge Carr. The book consists solely of thousands of theorems, many presented without proofs, and those with proofs only have the briefest. Ramanujan encountered the book in 1903 when he was 15 years old. That the book was not an orderly procession of theorems all tied up with tidy proofs encouraged Ramanujan to jump in and make connections on his own. However, since the proofs included were often just one-liners, Ramanujan had a false impression of the rigor required in mathematics.
