Mathematician untangles legendary problem (Posted: 3/18/2005) Paroma Basu
Karl Mahlburg, a young mathematician, has solved a crucial chunk of a puzzle that has haunted number theorists since the math legend Srinivasa Ramanujan scribbled his revolutionary notions into a tattered notebook. "In a nutshell, this [work] is the final chapter in one of the most famous subjects in the story of Ramanujan," says Ken Ono, Mahlburg's graduate advisor and an expert on Ramanujan's work. Ono is a Manasse Professor of Letters and Science in mathematics. "Mahlburg's achievement is a striking one, " agrees George Andrews, a mathematics professor at Penn State University who has also worked deeply with Ramanujan's ideas. The father of modern number theory, Ramanujan died prematurely in 1920 at the age of 32. The Indian mathematician's work is vast but he is particularly famous for noticing curious patterns in the way whole numbers can be broken down into sums of smaller numbers, or "partitions." The number 4, for example, has five partitions because it can be expressed in five ways, including 4, 3+1, 2+2, 1+1+2, and 1+1+1+1. Ramanujan, who had little formal training in mathematics, made partition lists for the first 200 integers and observed a peculiar regularity. For any number that ends in 4 or 9, he found, the number of partitions is always divisible by 5. Similarly, starting at 5, the number of partitions for every seventh integer is a multiple of 7, and, starting with 6, the partitions for every 11th integer are a multiple of 11. ... http://www.news.wisc.edu/releases/10833.html Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _______________________________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list medianews@twiar.org To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
