Bruce Berndt is a Mathematics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who spent more than 40 years finding the proofs of Ramanujan's Notebooks. According to Academic Influence, Dr. Bernt is the 5th most influential mathematician.
In this conversation, we talk to Dr. Berndt to find out how Ramanujan found him and how Dr. Berndt found Ramanujan.
Srinivasa Ramanujan (aka The Man Who Knew Infinity) was the greatest Indian mathematician ever to have lived. His story is a story of obsessively following his curiosity and relentlessly pursuing what he loved.
Why did Dr. Berndt spend more than 40 years proving every result of the notebook? Ramanujan didn't write the proofs. He was that great and had an absurd level of mathematical intuition.
Ramanujan's story is unique because he had no formal math background and never finished college. He was humbly self-taught. He did not fit in because of his greatness, so the system pushed him out.
Fortunately, Ramanujan found Hardy, an English mathematician who believed in him and helped him get out of the "system" to work on his mathematics. What if Hardy never replied? Comparably, this is the story of many other Ramanujan-like people around the world who get pushed to the side because of their inability to fit in the assembly line educational system.
Obsession and curiosity over well-roundedness are how geniuses are made.
Ramanujan's moving story and astonishing mathematics made Dr. Berndt spend almost fifty years of his life proving every result in Ramanujan's Notebooks. And why one of the best experiences of Dr. Bernt's life was holding Ramanujan's slate, where Ramanujan spent countless hours doing mathematics.
Moreover, Dr. Berndt is one of the greatest analytic number theorists, and while he recently retired, he continues to do research, and most of it is, of course, motivated by Ramanujan's work.
Needless to say, Dr. Berndt truly encompasses the philosophy of every UIUC Talkshow guest, people who are sane in a way most people are crazy.
We hope you can be as inspired by this conversation as we were.
EPISODE LINKS:
Bruce Berndt's Website: https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~berndt/
Bruce Berndt's UIUC Website: https://math.illinois.edu/directory/profile/berndt
OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:39 - Mock Theta Functions
3:06 - Ramanujan's Big Leaps
5:08 - Ramanujan's Divinity
7:45 - Ramanujan's Early Life
14:16 - Ramanujan arrives in England
16:22 - How Berndt found Ramanujan
26:55 - Ramanujan's Home
30:24 - Ramanujan's Slate
36:04 - The Lost Notebook
48:43 - How Ramanujan found Berndt
54:48 - India's perspective of Ramanujan
56:30 - What would you ask Ramanujan?
1:02:58 - Ramanujan's obsession & pressures to be "well-rounded"
1:07:04 - We need new systems to allow people to follow their obsessions
1:10:00 - College Admissions & Ramanujan would not be accepted at UIUC
1:14:00 - Advice for young people
1:20:59 - Favorite UIUC Memories
1:28:00 - What would be the greatest mathematics discovery?
1:33:18 - Ramanujan and Complex Analysis
🚥Overrated or Underrated Section 🚥
1:35:28 - 🚕 1729
1:38:20 - 🏆 Millennium Prize Problems
1:39:02 - 👨🏫 Small Colleges
1:43:38 - 🏀 UIUC Basketball
1:44:40 - Closing Words
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