8th February

Mathematicians Of The Day

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:
(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 ...

The postage stamp of one of today's mathematicians at THIS LINK was issued in 2005.

Click on Ⓟ for a poster.

Born:

Died:

Quotation of the day

From John von Neumann

By and large it is uniformly true that in mathematics there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment it becomes useful; and that this lapse can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.

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