A beautiful Mind

Every Magic trick consists of three parts, or acts....

The first part is called the Pledge..

The magician shows you something ordinary - A deck of cards or a bird..or a man

He shows you this object and pledges you to its utter normality...

Perhaps he asks you to inspect it...to see that it is indeed real ..its unaltered..normal..but of course it probably is in't..

The Second Act is called the Turn...

The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it to something extra ordinary..Now you are looking for the secret..but you wont find it ..becuase you are not really looking....you don't really want to know...you want to be fooled..

But you couldn't clap yet..Beacuse making something disappear is not enough..you have to bring it back.

That's why every magic trick has a third act..The hardest part.../

The part we call....

The Prestige.. ..........From the Movie..'The Prestige"

I heard about Ramanujan as a reticent and confused teenager. Back then i was interrested in math but was limited to my knowledge which was nothing compared to the profound chanllenges the subject posessed. I had these traits, like not able to sleep bacause of not able to deduce a theorem or tapping the door of my teacher at 1:00 am when my teacher took me to be the mad guy who keeps knocking at their door halway through the night.

But that was 9 years back and the world of math never intrigued me till today, when i had the fortune of getting my hands on the book " The Man who knew Infinity - A LIFE OF THE GENIUS RAMANUJAM by Robert Kanigel. The book takes you to Kumbokonam, the heart of southern India where Ramanujan's legend still has buyers and is the source of Ramanujan's divine inspiration. He would have been the most underrated and unexplored brains if not for Hardy who responded to his letter finding hidden traits of a genius in the making. He invited Ramanujan to Cambridge, and thus started a relationship that spoke only one lanuage - The language of maths..........ad infinitum.

Ramanujan , in the language ogf the Ploish emigr'e mathematician Mark Kac, was a "magician", rather than an ordinary genious."

An ordinary genious is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how this mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.

An excerpt from the book 'The Man who knew Infinity - Alife of Genius Ramanujan - By Robert Kenigel - Page 281

Ramanujan's mathematics was magical. It inspired awe. Most of Ramanujan's work never had any proofs. Not that he was not capable of prooving his formulaes and theorems, but he chose not to. He did not believe in the Prestige...