8th February
On this day in 1913, G H Hardy answered the letter he had received from Ramanujan containing the latter's results. Hardy's letter begins:-
I was exceedingly interested by your letter and by the theorems which you state. You will however understand that, before I can judge properly of the value of what you have done, it is essential that I should see proofs of some of your assertions. Your results seem to me to fall into roughly three classes:The postage stamp of one of today's mathematicians at THIS LINK was issued in 2005.
(1) there are a number of results that are already known, or easily deducible from known theorems;
(2) there are results which, so far as I know, are new and interesting, but interesting rather from their curiosity and apparent difficulty than their importance;
(3) there are results which appear to be new and important ...