Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today.
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Very interesting read despite not knowing any advanced maths.
So my question(s) to mathematicians is: What does knowing these connections do for the field? What kind of things will this lead to? Feel free to speculate or give examples of other seemingly-small math discoveries that led to modern technology!
I don't mean that dismissively, I just don't understand why this is so important because the implications are beyond my skillset
Number Theory, the field where Ramanujam had bigger impact, used to be pure mathematics, with no expected use and basically a hobby for mathematicians, is the base of modern encryption and without it the internet as we know it couldn't exist.
Interesting! Do you have any guesses as to what sort of applications partition identities might see?
I'm an actuarie, so I'm thinking in an insurance related way it could they have some use. Imagine a re insurance contract (the insurance that insurance companies buy to protect themselves) that pay after an S = sum Xi value of cumulative claims is reached (i = 1, 2, 3... number of claims, X = value of each claim) . How many ways can S be reached, given that they are N claims, with variable X?
For example, S = 4, that value can be reached by X = 4, X1= 3 + X2 = 1, and so on. Knowing the number of ways you can reach that S value, can help you with the pricing of the contract, or forecasting to when the S value is going to be reached.
Other than that, they are distributed computer power, if you need S computer power, how many ways can this value be reached knowing that you have access to N GPUs each one with Xi capacity.
Very interesting example with the insurance but it was your second idea that really brought it home for me. Thanks for elaborating!