The existence of Ramanujan is pretty weird, as far as cognitive systems go.
Like, what process made him literally dream up correct elliptic integrals?
@niplav Something something monkeys on typewriters.
He was just born and raised in just the right way to not only have the right perspective for it, but also lucky enough to be seen for what he had. I'm sure there's tons of geniuses out there that don't because they live in squalor, or just rural areas where it's harder for the world to see you.
Also worth noting he had no formal math education, so he developed his whole system of mathing in a way that was unintelligible from the rest of the community.
@Paradox The last part is what's interesting about this: If I think about it in terms of AI or cognitive algorithms, he had ridiculously little training data and still his brain implemented an algorithm to extremely efficiently & effortlessly do math at an extremely high level.
Maybe math is just algorithmically shallower than we usually think?
@niplav Nah, I don't think that's it. We're still the ones coming up with the algorithms. Math is pretty much just coming up with a bunch of rules and trying to build things within those rules. Sometimes you have to use different rules for different things, like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry.
I don't know anything specific about Ramanujan's math, although I have been reading Matt Parker's book about math and he talked about Ramanujan for a bit. It might be that Ram used a different set of rules from the norm, and I think the symbols were different too, although that probably wouldn't have helped him make anything groundbreaking, just obscured the data from others unintentionally.