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by assemblyman
25 days ago
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As a curiosity, the contrast between Grothendieck and Ramanujan is very striking. One famous story about Ramanujan from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number)): "Hardy stated that the number 1729 from a taxicab he rode was a "dull" number and "hopefully it is not unfavourable omen", but Ramanujan remarked that "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways"." They, of course, were very different personalities, doing very different mathematics with very different impacts on the field. I always found it interesting that Ramanujan seemed to be very comfortable with numbers, their properties, patterns (continued fractions) and Grothendieck was very comfortable with structures and their rhythms without paying attention to concrete examples. |
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