Posted by Robert on January 21, 2017 at 08:00:15 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Ramanujan (was Review of 'Swallows, Amazons and Coots') posted by Robert Hill on January 18, 2017 at 15:01:34:
I have found that most academic people have very little interest outside their immediate office. I do an awful lot of very fine work with accelerometers, and at the moment we have one on a bridge in London, I have spent the last two months getting it to work on a Linux box, using MONO so that we had a more stable platform than WINDOWS and cheaper. I got it running on NUC, which is expensive and I just got it running on an English PI 2. We cannot use the USB driver written for windows so we go through the ethernet. Fair amount of code writing, but fun. Dick would have had a PI 2 or 3 on his summer hols.
During this process I cam across Ramanujan paper on Highly Composite Numbers, the sort of Bletchley Park cross Dick stuff you could really grow to love, although as Hardy said it was of little relevance, one does not do math or read AR for relevance one does it for fun.
I read the paper and was struck by the idea at the beginning of how he would count the prime components, I do not have anything like the skills that man had, but when I saw the answer I went damn that is simple. I then thought I could code it and check the answers, the paper notes that using a pencil and paper in 1915 Ramanujan missed only 2 of the highly composite numbers, literally numbers in the thousands and tens of thousands. One must ask if Ramanujan had been alive in 1941 would he have been at Bletchley and would he have solved those problems faster.
During this time of writing I did not have use the unmentionable device once, but I wish Ed and I could visit WI together and like little boys take a swim in the lake.
Now where is my book on plumbing.
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