Hacker Friendly

I’ve been teaching at the ICTP in Trieste, home of one of the best scientific libraries in Europe. The library happens to be in the same building as the cafeteria.

A few nights ago, I arrived a bit early for dinner, so I went to the library to study vectors and quaternions and other 3D topics that make most mortals cringe in physical terror. (This is all part of the research for our upcoming LSL scripting book… We suffer so you don’t have to!)

In the middle of the library stands a large bust of Srinivasa Ramanujan, widely regarded as one of the best (and probably one of the most well known) mathematicians in history.

There is a famous story about Ramanujan’s facility with numbers:

I remember once going to see him when he was 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.”

Ramanujan was a highly intuitive and self-taught mathematician who failed out of school. He was apparently able to derive many principles of complex mathematics with access to only a single basic mathematics textbook. With a lack of formal training, he invented his own notation for some ideas, and would often record the results of his work without including the proof. It took years for other mathematicians to derive formal proofs for some of the work found in his notebooks. Unfortunately, he died very young, leaving a legacy of legend, some important new mathematical ideas, and a few inscrutable notebooks.

So I sat and studied under the watchful gaze of Ramanujan in the hopes that even 0.000001% of his incredible ability might rub off on me, disregarding float representation problems of course.