Sunday, August 7, 2011

Unable to understand the contents of Ramanjuan "lost notebooks". How to get help interpreting them?

One of the greatest indian mathematicians Ramanujan died at 32 only. He never went to university or school. He was self-taught in math and did home study only without any kind of textbook. Also he was poor man and unskilled labor jobs is all he did. However, in his notebook he created very amazing formulas for 1/pi and similar stuff, which happened to be extremely accurate. He created a series of notebooks known as "lost notebooks". All these notebooks were prior to 1920 and were hand-written. Those hand-written pages of his notebook have now been scanned and uploaded on internet in the link below. However, I do not understand anything in his lost notebooks. I am a math major in university. I graduate next year, but I cannot make heads nor tails of his notebook material. How did Ramanuja create such stuff on his own without any schooling or education? That too when he was poor man. These notebooks are over 90 years old, and even today the material seem so hard to understand.

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