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Robert Kanigel

Robert Kanigel Biography

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“Ramanujan had lost all his scholarships. He had failed in school. Even as a tutor of the subject he loved most, he'd been found wanting. He had nothing. And yet, viewed a little differently, he had everything. For now there was nothing to distract him from his notebooks- notebooks, crammed with theorems, that each day, each week, bulged wider.”

FailureMathematicsAutodidacticism
Book:The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
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“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.”

YearsScienceNatureNaturalAbilityStepsMathematicsScalesPlentyMathematicalMathematicianHardyRamanujan
Author:Robert Kanigel
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“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”

LittlesWholeShowsProblemSchoolNumbersKeysHigh SchoolMathematicsCornersFactorsRelatedImaginaryProbabilityGeometryTapestryTrigonometryImaginary Numbers
Author:Robert Kanigel
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