May 442 Blog

• Consider the so-called Hardy-Ramanujan number 1729, and the story of Taxicab Numbers, retold on Wolfram Mathworld at the link above. Hardy is quoted as saying of Ramanujan that "each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends". What do you make of this in terms of Major's paper?   In this story , when the number first came into his mind he thought of it as a rather dull number,  adding that he hoped that wasn't a bad omen . However, as he thought about it, he found that “it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways" . In the paper, it is stated that each number has its own personality and people give them associations with good/bad fortune, heavy/light senses. Also, different numbers stimulate activity in a different area in the brain. So there’s biological reasons associated with our feelings about the numbers as well. For Ramanujan, probably he just had some different arrang...

Euclid was the founder of geometry. His Elements is one of the most influential works in the history of mathematics, serving as the main textbook for teaching mathematics (especially geometry) from the time of its publication until the late 19th or early 20th century. I'm not good at interpreting poems but the first poem seems to talk about how Euclid found beauty in geometry findings, in shapes of shifting lineage, and this helped him experience the "flow" that releases him from dusty human bondage to luminous air. His  soul and his whole being  was lifted by this beauty, which gets him away from the human state and into a higher state of being. The next poem seems to disagree... and say that beauty is clothed, and say the first poet is an idiot. but I don't really get what he was objecting to .....and what he proposes instead!