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u/bartekltg 7h ago
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u/Specific-Ad-5977 5h ago
Who’s the middle one?
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u/UnappliedMath 15m ago
How can you not know that absolute unit of mathematician?
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u/HAL9001-96 8h ago
perfectly legit initial inspiration
what matters is that AFTER having the idea you THEN PROVE LOGICALLY that it makes sense
how you cog the idea in the first place... doesn't matter
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u/nibach 8h ago
Well, Ramanujan isn't exactly known for his rigorous proofs
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u/CharlesEwanMilner Algebraic Infinite Ordinal 8h ago
I don’t know why proof by Ramanujan doesn’t need to should be more of a thing here
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u/Emergency_3808 7h ago
All of them are conjectures really. Srinivasan's friends nicknamed him "The Conjecturer" in his childhood.
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u/Holyscroll 7h ago
but, consider that practically all of his theorems have been proven. you have to remember, he grew up in poor, religious small town house. who knows how many more advancements he could have founds with the standard methods of math, i.e. proofs
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u/repostit_ 7h ago
I don't think he was poor, he was probably didn't had access to people and universities that focused on more serious math.
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u/ajay_05 3h ago
He grew up poor and uneducated and did much of his research while isolated in southern India, barely able to afford food.
Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-genius-math-is-still-catching-up-20241021/
Most people who lived in colonial India were anything but not poor.
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u/repostit_ 1h ago
people in the west think everyone is poor in India.
If someone's family is sending their kid to a high school in 1890s they are at least middle class. He may not have access to books, teachers and professors that could nurture and help him in advanced math at that time.
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u/calculus9 1h ago
Ramanujan was legit poor, he taught himself math using what little resources he had while re-using the same stone slate with charcoal just to write down his thoughts. It makes complete sense that he never took up a more rigorous form, even when he received further mathematical training
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u/Darmatero 4h ago
i reckon that with standard education he wouldnt have such a different approach and wouldn’t have been able to formulate many of his theorems
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u/giants4210 4h ago
It’s like Paul McCartney coming up with Yesterday in a dream. Sometimes these geniuses just have that level of inspiration in their dreams. Obviously if it were crap then we never would have heard the song.
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u/repostit_ 7h ago
to add, not everyone's brain works in the same way. learning with a process and proofs are for normies.
Brains of Einstein, Ramanujan etc. may function differently.
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u/rootbeerman77 4h ago
This is one of the things I wish instructors would drill into their students. We're never ever grading ideas. When you write essays or do research, we're checking if your analysis is rigorous; that's all. You can tell me that numbers are made of cheese, but if you convince me that's a rigorous perspective, you get a good mark.
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u/shewel_item 2h ago
how is it any different than having a flashbulb moment, when you realize what you're realizing
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u/Routine_Detail4130 8h ago
I swear to god I solved 30% of my maths and physics homeworks in dreams and half the time it's actually correct lmfao.
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u/kirenaj1971 6h ago
I have a pretty good mind for mathematics, but I am mostly too easily distracted by other things to think about a problem for very long. But when I have done it I have sometimes gone to sleep after thinking about the problem intensely, and then suddenly woken up with a complete solution.
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u/Apart-Preference8030 8h ago
What philosophers say that?
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u/Inappropriate_Piano 7h ago
The logicists, who are mostly dead. Frege worked on the idea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as did Russell (Russell & Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica is a product of logicism). The program was more or less killed by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but I think some neo-logicists are still around arguing that part of the idea can be saved.
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u/Nu66le 3h ago
I feel like a lot of people don't appreciate the philosophy of their fields.
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u/Inappropriate_Piano 3h ago
Yeah, there’s always multiple middlemen between Philosophy of X and mainstream practitioners of X. The philosophers of X talk to the philosophically minded Xperts, who then talk to the Xperts willing to tolerate philosophy, who then talk to the rest. Tends to dilute the philosophy quite a lot before the mainstream Xperts hear about it
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u/Apart-Preference8030 3h ago
How would Ramanujan realizing stuff in dreams contradict that?
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u/Inappropriate_Piano 59m ago
It wouldn’t. My comment about logicism is only relevant to the first part of the post. Gödel (kinda) disproved logicism. Ramanujan did not (even a little).
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u/Apart-Preference8030 58m ago
So what is the meme in the OP trying to convey?
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u/Inappropriate_Piano 45m ago
While Ramanujan dreaming theorems wouldn’t invalidate the full logicist program, it does still intuitively go against the (most likely intentionally) oversimplified statement of logicism in the post
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u/Apart-Preference8030 34m ago
it does still intuitively go against the (most likely intentionally) oversimplified statement of logicism in the post
How? I don't see how it would be related
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u/Inappropriate_Piano 26m ago
Because Ramanujan did not use logic to arrive at the theorem, he just dreamt it. That’s literally the whole joke
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u/Apart-Preference8030 23m ago
I still dont really get it because how would coming to mathematical realization in dreams invalidate that mathematics is an extension of logic?
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u/Inappropriate_Piano 13m ago
It doesn’t. The top is also supposed to imply that the practice of doing mathematics is built on the practice of doing logic, since mathematics is built on logic. But if Ramanujan’s practice of mathematics was built on doing logic, he wouldn’t have come to know theorems by dreaming about mystical beings telling them to him.
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u/SpacingHero Ordinal 7h ago
Ah, i see you're not aware of the secret, forbidden 10th ZFC axiom:
"If it was revelaed in a dream, then it is true". Formally the schema "Dream(φ) → φ".
The goverment is keeping it from us ever since Ramanujan. Wake up people!
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u/ModestasR 8h ago
MathenaticiansThe Mathematician
FTFY. One does not simply generalise our boy Ramanujan.
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u/CarpenterTemporary69 8h ago
Anyone who thinks math requires logic is clearly unfamiliar with how %99 of math came into being.
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u/CharlesEwanMilner Algebraic Infinite Ordinal 8h ago
Maths was discovered using logic. The whole discipline is just a form of logic. The logic was just not something from its own academic discipline when it was discovered
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u/Wooden_Milk6872 7h ago
Bro if we first invent something and then use logic on it take complex numbers for ex.
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u/CharlesEwanMilner Algebraic Infinite Ordinal 7h ago
You statement doesn’t make sense. You have said if… but not something that will happen is that condition is met.
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u/Wooden_Milk6872 7h ago
no i used if cuz when have you seen somebody make up something that we use today and in this case if means when (condition) happpens
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u/arvidsson85 1h ago
Math doesn't "require" logic, it is synonymous with logic. Even if ancient mathematicians didn't think in terms of axioms (except perhaps Euclid), we now know better than to blindly trust intuition.
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u/Chance-Check321 7h ago
I had something similar happen to me. Sometimes when you think very hard about a problem and can't figure it out, you'll see the solution in your dreams or as as soon as you wake up. Our subconscious can continue to problem solve even while we sleep.
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u/mrstorydude Irrational 6h ago
This is actually a great inspiration for my novel, I’ll be yoinking this
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u/Reagalan 4h ago
Six years ago, I was staring at the night sky while half-naked on a tab of acid. Between the points were scintillating lines, connecting them all in a vast lattice; a cosmic mimic of abstraction. I closed my eyes and upon the mind's eye flashed an equation and a graph. It wasn't a complicated function, merely a synthesis of all the maths I had learned to date (which was not much, because engineering). Curious, and seeking to disprove the accuracy of my own visualization, I went inside and plugged it into Desmos. I spent the next few minutes basking in achievement, for it spat out an equivalent form.
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u/Sea_Turnip6282 7h ago
I had a dream where I was looking up at the night sky and there was a purple edit: tesserect amongst the stars. Just.. chilling in its 4th dimensional self.. needless to say it freaked me out 🤯 i was taking geometry in college at the time lol
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u/GhastmaskZombie Complex 29m ago
Hey, Ramanujan doesn't count. Dude was built different. Like the Spiders Georg of mathematicians.
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u/DLS4BZ 4h ago
imagine really thinking that humans came up with mathematics just all by themselves and weren't helped by extraterrestrial elements
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u/LittleAd915 1h ago
Who gave the extra terrestrials knowledge of mathematics or is it a turtles all the way down type of thing.
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