Robert Kanigel Quotes

• Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

  Robert Kanigel

  Nature, Science, Years

  54 Copy quote

• ... combinatorics, a sort of glorified dice-throwing.

  Robert Kanigel

  Dice, Mathematics, Throwing

  Robert Kanigel (2016). “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan”, p.250, Simon and Schuster

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• Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability

  Robert Kanigel

  School, Keys, Numbers

  14 Copy quote

• Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package."

  Robert Kanigel

  Math, Ramanujan, Done

  Robert Kanigel (2016). “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan”, p.349, Simon and Schuster

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