Question 1

Who was Srinivasa Ramanujan?

Accepted Answer

An Indian mathematician of extraordinary and largely **self-taught** ability, who produced thousands of results — many previously unknown, some still being proved a century later — with almost no formal training and without providing conventional proofs.

**His background.** Born in 1887 in southern India, he encountered mathematics largely through a single compendium of results, worked obsessively, and consequently **failed his other subjects and lost his scholarship twice**. He worked as a clerk in Madras while filling notebooks with original mathematics, in poverty and isolation.

**The letter.** In 1913 he wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, enclosing a list of results without proofs. Hardy's reaction is the famous part: some results he recognised, some he could prove with effort, and others were so strange that — in his own account — **they "must be true, because if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them."**

**What followed.** Hardy arranged for him to come to Cambridge, where they collaborated for roughly five years, producing major work on **partition theory**, the distribution of prime numbers, **highly composite numbers**, and mock theta functions.

**Why his method was unusual.** He arrived at results by intuition and pattern, often without the formal proof European mathematics demanded — attributing insights to the goddess Namagiri. Hardy's role was substantially in supplying rigour, and their partnership is frequently described as one of unusually complementary opposites.

**The cost.** He struggled with the English climate, illness, isolation and the difficulty of maintaining a strict vegetarian diet during wartime rationing. He returned to India in 1919 and **died in 1920, aged 32.**

**The lost notebook.** A collection of his final year's work, rediscovered in a Cambridge library in 1976, contained results that opened new areas — and his **mock theta functions** have since proved relevant to mathematics and physics developed decades later.

**The taxicab anecdote** — 1729 as the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two ways — comes from Hardy visiting him in hospital.

Question 2

Who was Emmy Noether?

Accepted Answer

A German mathematician whose work underpins both modern abstract algebra and theoretical physics — and who spent much of her career barred from the positions her work merited. Noether's theorem,

Question 3

Who was Ada Lovelace and what did she actually do?

Accepted Answer

Ada Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815, was a British mathematician best known for her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — a mechanical general-purpose computer that was designed in

Question 4

Did Pythagoras discover Pythagoras' theorem?

Accepted Answer

Almost certainly not. The relationship was known and used for over a thousand years before he was born, across several civilisations. The prior evidence: Babylonian mathematics. The clay tablet

Question 5

Who was Émilie du Châtelet?

Accepted Answer

A French natural philosopher and mathematician of the early eighteenth century whose translation and commentary on Newton's Principia remains the standard French edition — and whose own work on

Question 6

Who was Katherine Johnson?

Accepted Answer

A mathematician at NASA whose calculations of orbital trajectories were central to the early American crewed spaceflight programme — and who worked for years in a segregated unit, doing work that was

Question 7

Was Einstein really bad at maths in school?

Accepted Answer

No. This is one of the most durable myths in popular history, and Einstein himself explicitly denied it. Shown a version of the claim in a newspaper, he responded: "I never failed in mathematics.

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