Hardy's quotes on Ramanujan

Hardy wrote of 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..."

"In his favourite topics, like infinite series and continued fractions, he had no equal this century. His insight into algebraic formulae, often (and unusually) brought about by considering numerical examples, was truly amazing. But in analytic number theory, a subject he is often associated with, I do not believe he actually knew that much. He certainly contributed little of significance that was not known already. And in a subject that relied so much on proof, a subject where intuition had a bad habit of coming unstuck, he produced much that was false." "I remember once going to see [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. 'No,' he replied, 'it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.'" - G.H. Hardy "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C Berndt: ``Paul Erdos has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J.E. Littlewood 30, Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100. G.H.Hardy,"


source:http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Srinivasa_Ramanujan_-_bHardys_Quote…

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