Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Jennifer Nielsen
Math 464WI
More than a century ago, under the rolling hills of Namakkal, there lived a
husband and his wife who so dearly wanted a child, but after many years
they were still childless. The wife, knowing it was not her lot in life to be
barren, went to the base of the mountain to the temple of lionhearted
Narasimha, who roared down pillars to prove the immananence of God to
nonbelievers. Something lead her to skip Narasimha’s statuary den, and
pause, gazing up, at the shrine of his consort, Namagiri, the goddess.
Dropping her garland of flowers and falling to her feet, she prayed, on her
beads, to this fierce mother divine, for a son, making her womb itself an
offering.
Later this year she found herself pregnant.
She and her husband celebrated.
They did not know that the child forming in the woman’s womb was no
ordinary child, but a godchild, on loan as it were, of a goddess.
THE MAN
“I have to form myself, as I have never really formed before, and try to help you to
form, some of the reasoned estimate of the most romantic figure in the recent
history of mathematics, a man whose career seems full of paradoxes and
contradictions, who defies all cannons by which we are accustomed to judge one
another and about whom all of us will probably agree in one judgement only, that
he was in some sense a very great mathematician.” – G.H. Hardy (9, p. 1)
In
honor of this anecdote, Taxicab(k, j, n) is the smallest number which can be
expressed as the sum of j kth powers in n different ways. So, Taxicab(3, 2, 2)
=1729.
There are a number of taxicabs found over the years:
Taxicab(1) = 2
= 13 + 13 (trivial).
Taxicab(2) = 1729
= 13 + 123
= 93 + 103
Taxicab(3) = 87539319
= 1673 + 4363
= 2283 + 4233
= 2553 + 4143
He began working with series early on. In the early days he was
more likely to explain how he got a result, probably as a tool for future
reference. His first entry on the topic runs as follows:
(1)
We will follow with Ramanujan’s proof (1, , beginning with the identity
(3)
Let x = 2k and sum on k, The right side of (1) is found to be equal to:
(4)
(5)
[Simplifying]
(6)
Remember that complex numbers are numbers which can be written in the form
a + bi, where i = −1 . Complex numbers are often used in higher level physics,
where the plane of complex numbers is depicted orthoganol to the plane of real
numbers (see the figure), and multiplication by imaginary numbers can be used to
functions which are used to map complex numbers to complex numbers. These
part.)
Note that the modular group is the group of fractional linear transformations in
the upper half of the complex plane. Multiplying a complex number z by a matrix M
in the modular group and then inputting Mz into our function yields the same result
as plugging z itself into the function.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
where a, b, c, and d are integers, and ad − bc = 1. (Note that this is a subgroup of the commonly
studied mobius group, which satisfies ad − bc ≠ 0.)
Now we have a working definition of a modular function.
Ramanujan was particularly fond of these kinds of functions, and worked with
them thoughout his career, most intensively towards the end of his life. A particular
modular function which he worked with shortly before his death has become known
generating function,
x = e 2iπz
, where .
Note that the symbol ∏ indicates a series of multiplications instead of the additions
x (1 −3 x + 5 x 3 − 7 x 6 +...) 8 . (Hardy, 161). While Ramanujan’s work behind the math is,
= (2)
Now the key is to obtain to the final statement as proved by Hardy with Jacobi’s
identity.
So, if we start with the polynomial (1-x), we would obtain a cube of 1-3x +
3x2 – x3 and then delete all terms with degree greater than 1, leaving
ourselves with the expression 1-3x. Starting with 1 – x – x2, having chopped
off terms of degree five and higher, we obtain a cube of 1 – 3x + 5x3 - ….
after chopping off all terms in the cube with degree greater than five. (This
method is described in Mathematical Marvels by S.
Shirali.) After repeating this several times, a pattern
ultimately emerges. The “triangular” numbers form the
exponents, and odd numbers of alternating sign form
the coefficients. In a fairly intuitive manner, we
ultimately arrive at the identity:
(2, p. 596).
Almost no observation was made of how Ramanujan thought up his
more complex, proofless formulas. According to his English mentor,
Godfrey Hardy, “It seemed ridiculous to worry him about how he had
found this or that known theorem, when he was showing me half a
dozon new ones almost every day.” (9, p. 12.)
Perhaps even more frustratingly, Ramanujan made little effort to
explaining.
For the first three years of his life, Ramanujan scarcely spoke (7, p.
13). But it remains that when Ramanujan did learn language it was in a
with autism and aspergers: “…his hand, held and guided by his
rice spread across the floor, as each character was spoken aloud.”
mind enthralled not with language but with the bare mechanics of
reality. “Soon fears of Ramanujan’s dumbness were dispelled…” but
his mind continued to operate at its own unique pace (6, p. 13).
Moksha
We will close with the freeing realization—or “moksha”, to use a
Hindu term—that the world Ramanujan peered into may be the very
world in which you and I inhabit.
By now, most fans of popular science will be at least superficially
familiar with the term “string theory” – a theory in which our reality
holds 10, and not 3, spacial dimensions, some of which are collapsed
to submicroscopic size, and in which particles are exchanged for
interdimensional vibrating strings (5).
We recall now the Ramanujan function consists of a modular
mapping raised to a 24th power, which reduces after several
expansions to a series raised to a power of 8. (A similar transformation
occurs when the Ramanujan function is generalized by physicists.)
When Ramanujan first scrawled his tau function on a scap piece of
paper, he may or may not have known that he was viewing something
extremely important to the way our universe is thought to operate.
According to string theorist Dr. Michio Kaku,
“In string theory, each of the 24 modes [represented in the exponent
of the]…Ramanujan function corresponds to a physical vibration of the
string. Whenever the string executes its complex motions in space-
time by splitting and recombining, a large number of highly
sophisticated mathematical identities must be satisfied.These are
precisely the mathematical identities discovered by Ramanujan.
Since physicists add two more dimensions when they count the
total number of vibrations appearing in a relativistic theory, this means
that space-time must have 24 + 2 = 26 space-time dimensions. When
the Ramanujan function is generalized, the number 24 is replaced by
the number 8. Thus the critical number for the superstring is 8 + 2, or
10. This is the origin of the tenth dimension. The string vibrates in ten
dimensions because it requires these generalized Ramanujan functions
in order to remain self-consistent.” (5, p. 173)
9. Hardy, GH. Ramanujan: 12 Lectures on Subjects Suggested by his Life and Work.
Cambridge, 1940
10. Niven, I, et al. An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. Wiley, New York, 1991.
11. Ramanujan, Srinivasa, et al. Editors: Hardy, et al. Collected papers of Srinivasa
Ramanujan, AMS Bookstore, 2000.
15. Tammet, Daniel. Born on a Blue Day. Simon and Schuster, 2007.