Who Was Ramanujan?
Mixed feelings about this article:<p>1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before.<p>2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram&#x27;s occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to find the piece start out with little self-reference by the author, until:<p>&gt; The other, slightly more famous, track — less austere and less mathematically oriented — was Eton and Oxford, which happens to be where I went.<p>How is that relevant in an article titled <i>Who was Ramanujan?</i> It got worse a few paragraphs later, as Wolfram began discussing numeric approximations, and engaging in what was effectively product placement for WolframAlpha and Mathematica. There I was, trying to read about Ramanujan, and Wolfram kept interjecting with comments about his computation engine and his implementations of Ramanujan&#x27;s formulae.<p>Toward the end of the article, after the biography of Ramanujan was complete and Wolfram turned to discussing expansions of Ramanujan&#x27;s results, such topics were fair game. &quot;What if Ramanujan had had Mathematica?&quot; is a valid question. Discussing cellular automata and Wolfram&#x27;s principle of computational equivalence, etc., etc. was fine at that point, since these are valid expansions to the topic at hand.<p>Nonetheless, the blatant product placement and continuous breaking of the flow of the text to push some function implemented in WolframAlpha on the reader was extraordinarily annoying, and, frankly, deeply disappointing. If Wolfram sets out to write <i>the unlikely tale of a mysterious letter, and its place in the history of mathematics</i>, as advertised by the subtitle, then I would have hoped that he could leave his egregious self-advertising to the end of the article -- or better yet -- to a separate one altogether.