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I see, and which villages were these? The tribe of antimathematicians Did this happen everywhere in the world? Did all Mathematicians originate from one place? Was this prerecorded history? See this thread is funny already
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herd behavior is a comical thing - Thanks Silver Spider
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Not funny
Anyways I read somewhere that Thales was supposed to be crazily good...but Gauss was a Genius from a very early age too......maybe Leibnitz don't know much aboot Mathematicians to be honest...but what do you define as "natural" Mathematicians....?
This is a remarkable story of perhaps the greatest mathematician who has ever lived. What makes this story compelling is that Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was born in India in 1887 and lived to only 33, is a person largely unknown outside the world of mathematics. But his short life's work will amaze you!
Without a doubt, Ramanujan was a genius, ranking with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and a few other great mathematicians of the past two centuries. His story is unique in the history of scientific inquiry, yet you probably have never heard of him or what he accomplished. Here is his story.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 near Madras, in India. India was largely a poor country, and Ramanujan's family could not afford to educate him. He had no library of books, or other resource material, and was unaware of the centuries of mathematical ideas and discoveries which had preceeded his birth. The only exposure he had to modern Western mathematics was one small, obscure book of mathematics.
Nevertheless, as a small child he became fascinated with numbers and mathematical ideas, and by the age of ten, it was evident that he had great gifts. On his own, he rediscovered Euler's identity relating trigonometric functions and exponentials. Using the obscure theorems in his one small mathematics book as a starting point, he developed his own formulas.
He was able to win a scholarship to high school, but found that he was already well beyond what was being taught, and dropped out. Eventually he landed a low-paying clerk's job which didn't demand too much of his time, and began to devote himself to exploring mathematical ideas.
Without any awareness of what had already been discovered by European mathematicians, he re-derived many of the previous century's discoveries completely on his own. What hundreds of other mathematicians had contributed to the field during the previous hundred years, he discovered on his own, all by himself . (Tragically, much of his short life was spent rediscovering mathematics that was already known).
Ramanujan kept a record of his ideas in a set of notebooks, and some of these ideas he sent in a letter to a respected mathematician in England, Godfrey Hardy. Hardy at first was tempted to throw away the letter, because the ideas it contained were seemingly just a collection of already well-known mathematical theorems. However, when he eventually took a closer look at Ramanujan's letter, he realized that these ideas had been developed by the young mathematician completely on his own, without any mathematical training. More importantly, he discovered that Ramanujan had included 120 theorems that were completely unknown to Western mathematicians, and Hardy had never seen anything like them. Some of them he couldn't even understand.
Hardy now recognized the genius of Ramanujan, and arranged for him to come to England to study at prestigious Cambridge University. There the young mathematician was finally able to work with others and share their ideas. Ramanujan was awarded a B.A. Degree in 1916, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in February, 1918, and was also elected to a Cambridge Trinity College Fellowship, in October, 1918.
In these three or four short years, between 1914 and 1918, he produced an astounding number of new theorems, filling more notebooks with his work. His approach to mathematical ideas was different than other mathematicians; he discovered new theorems in a completely incomprehensible manner. Ramanujan often said that his ideas came to him in his dreams, which he then wrote down.
After an intense three years of amazing work, Ramanujan sadly became ill of tuberculosis, and died, at the young age of 33. But he continued working right up until the end, and eventually left behind three volumes of his notes (and a fourth, which was only discovered in 1976), containing more than 4000 formulas, some of which had never been seen before, and which would represent a lifetime of work for any other mathematician.
Frustratingly, Ramanujan did not describe his work in his notes, nor did he provide proofs for his theorems. As a result, his writings remain a fascinating but largely undeveloped source of new ideas, which mathematicians are still trying to decipher. Many of his theorems and ideas have become valuable new tools in various branches of both mathematics and physics; his description of modular functions is one of the strangest ideas ever to be proposed in mathematics, yet has been found to be useful in the study of symmetry in particle physics only recently.
Unquestionably, Srinivasa Ramanujan was a most amazing mathematician, and truly a genius. The great tragedy is that he was able to devote so little of his short life to the study of new mathematics. What might he have accomplished had he lived?
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"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth."
Archimedes was the most famous mathematician and inventor of ancient Greece. He was born in in Syracuse, Sicily, in 287 BC, where he spent most of his life. He did, however, attend Euclid's school in Alexandria, Egypt, which was one of the biggest cities of the time.
The translation of many of Archimedes' works in the sixteenth century contributed greatly to the spread of knowledge of them, and influenced the work of the foremost mathematicians and physicists of the next century, including Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat.
Archimedes was well known in his own time, not because people had an interest in new mathematical ideas, but because Archimedes had invented many machines which were used as engines of war. These were particularly effective in the defence of Syracuse when it was attacked by the Romans. Archimedes invented the catapult, and according to one story, he discovered how to use mirrors and the sun's rays to burn invaders' boots and ships.
Archimedes published his works in the form of correspondence with the principal mathematicians of his time. His five surviving books include 'Floating Bodies', 'The Sand Reckoner', 'Measurement of the Circle', 'Spirals', and 'phere and Cylinder'.
His mathematical accomplishments include:
the principle of the lever
the law of hydrostatics (also know as Archimedes' Principle)
the discovery of pi and the approximation 22/7
the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere
discoveries in catoptrics (the branch of optics dealing with the reflection of light from curved or flat mirrors)
He is is credited with inventing:
the compound pulley
the catapult
the hydraulic screw, for raising water
(known as Archimedes' Screw)
Archimedes was also known as an outstanding astronomer; his observations of solstices were used by other astronomers of the era.
The story that he determined the proportion of gold and silver in a crown made for a king by weighing it in water is probably true, but the version that has him leaping from the bath in which he supposedly got the idea and running naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!" ("I have found it!") is probably just embellishment.
Archimedes is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. However, Archimedes' mathematical work was not continued in any important way in ancient times. It was not until some of his mathematical writings were translated into Arabic in the eighth century AD that attempts were made to extend his results. Then later, in the sixteenth century, Europeans came to know his work, and build on it; it is said that the rediscovery of the work of the ancient Greek mathematicians, among the foremost of whom was Archimedes, was the main impetus behind the mathematical triumphs of the 1600's, and the works of Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Leibniz and Newton.
Archimedes died in 212 BC, while helping to defend his city of Syracuse from attack.
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The case for Gauss
Gauss, Carl Friedrich , born Johann Friederich Carl Gauss, 1777–1855, German mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Gauss was educated at the Caroline College, Brunswick, and the Univ. of Göttingen, his education and early research being financed by the Duke of Brunswick. Following the death of the duke in 1806, Gauss became director (1807) of the astronomical observatory at Göttingen, a post he held until his death. Considered the greatest mathematician of his time and as the equal of Archimedes and Newton, Gauss showed his genius early and made many of his important discoveries before he was twenty. His greatest work was done in the area of higher arithmetic and number theory; his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (completed in 1798 but not published until 1801) is one of the masterpieces of mathematical literature.
Gauss was extremely careful and rigorous in all his work, insisting on a complete proof of any result before he would publish it. As a consequence, he made many discoveries that were not credited to him and had to be remade by others later; for example, he anticipated Bolyai and Lobachevsky in non-Euclidean geometry, Jacobi in the double periodicity of elliptic functions, Cauchy in the theory of functions of a complex variable, and Hamilton in quaternions. However, his published works were enough to establish his reputation as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Gauss early discovered the law of quadratic reciprocity and, independently of Legendre, the method of least squares. He showed that a regular polygon of n sides can be constructed using only compass and straight edge only if n is of the form 2p(2q+1)(2r+1) … , where 2q + 1, 2r + 1, … are prime numbers.
In 1801, following the discovery of the asteroid Ceres by Piazzi, Gauss calculated its orbit on the basis of very few accurate observations, and it was rediscovered the following year in the precise location he had predicted for it. He tested his method again successfully on the orbits of other asteroids discovered over the next few years and finally presented in his Theoria motus corporum celestium (1809) a complete treatment of the calculation of the orbits of planets and comets from observational data. From 1821, Gauss was engaged by the governments of Hanover and Denmark in connection with geodetic survey work. This led to his extensive investigations in the theory of space curves and surfaces and his important contributions to differential geometry as well as to such practical results as his invention of the heliotrope, a device used to measure distances by means of reflected sunlight.
Gauss was also interested in electric and magnetic phenomena and after about 1830 was involved in research in collaboration with Wilhelm Weber. In 1833 he invented the electric telegraph. He also made studies of terrestrial magnetism and electromagnetic theory. During the last years of his life Gauss was concerned with topics now falling under the general heading of topology, which had not yet been developed at that time, and he correctly predicted that this subject would become of great importance in mathematics.
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KMC Community Forums
Jul 11th, 2005 11:19 PM
Did all Mathematicians originate from one place? Was this prerecorded history?
See this thread is funny already 
