The teacher of the Earth Science class was lecturing on map reading.
He spent the class explaining about latitude, longitude, degrees, and minutes. Towards the end of class, the teacher asked his students, "Suppose I asked you to meet me for lunch at 23 degrees, 4 minutes north latitude and 45 degrees, 15 minutes east longitude..."
A student's voice broke the confused silence, and volunteered, "I guess you'd be eating alone, sir."
Srinivasa RamanujanDied 26 Apr 1920 at age 32 (born 22 Dec 1887). Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who did notablework on hypergeometric series and continued fractions. In number theory, he discovered properties of the partition function. Although self-taught, he was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. His remarkable familiarity with numbers, was shown by the following incident. While Ramanujan was in hospital in England, his Cambridge professor, G. H. Hardy, visited and remarked that he had taken taxi number 1729, a singularly unexceptional number. Ramanujan immediately responded that this number was actually quite remarkable: it is the smallest integer that can be represented in two ways by the sum of two cubes: 1729=13+123=93+103.« |
