Ramanujan quotes:

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  • They [formulae 1.10 - 1.12 of Ramanujan] must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them. -- G. H. Hardy
  • In the simplest array of digits [Ramanujan] detected wonderful properties: congruences, symmetries and relationships which had escaped the notice of even the outstandingly gifted theoreticians. -- James R Newman
  • That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover. -- Freeman Dyson
  • The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape. [On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.] -- Freeman Dyson
  • Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package." -- Robert Kanigel
  • There is great exhilaration in breaking one of these things. ... Ramanujan gives no hints, no proof of his formulas, so everything you do you feel is your own.[About verifying Ramanujan's equations in a newly found manuscript.] -- George Andrews
  • For my part, it is difficult for me to say what I owe to Ramanujan - his originality has been a constant source of suggestion to me ever since I knew him, and his death is one of the worst blows I have ever had. -- G. H. Hardy
  • Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package. -- Robert Kanigel
  • ... each of the 24 modes in the Ramanujan function corresponds to a physical vibration of a string. Whenever the string executes its complex motions in space-time by splitting and recombining, a large number of highly sophisticated mathematical identities must be satisfied. These are precisely the mathematical identities discovered by Ramanujan. -- Michio Kaku
  • I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said..." -- John Edensor Littlewood
  • There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface; but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining. -- G. H. Hardy
  • I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways." -- G. H. Hardy
  • Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100. -- Robert Kanigel
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