| ▲ | esoterae 3 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | Der_Einzige 3 days ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
On the shoulders of god(s)?, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan "He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." "While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing." —Srinivasa Ramanujan "The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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