On 18 January 2014 23:34, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > Alberto, > > What is amusing is that Ramanujan said this (that 1+2+3+... = -1/12) in a > letter to find a job in England, just to illustrate that he was not bad in > computing. He was of course considered as crackpot until the letter was > given to Hardy, who recognized immediately the genius. > Another amazing thing is that in string theory, the computation of the > mass of the photon leads to the expression 1/12 + (1+2+3+4+5+ ...). the > physicists thought "shit, again an infinity", but were comforted by the > number theorists, that on the complex numbers, this gives "somehow" the > needed -1/12. >
Or maybe it disproves string theory :-) (Time for brass and woodwind theory to have a go?) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
