| Having spent many years researching these matters, and convinced they
| can only be of supernatural origin, I firmly believe they are intended
| to accomplish some serious purpose in our day.
Well, Ivan Panin spent most of his life looking for numbers and
patterns. He certainly was able to convince himself, but that does
not make his conclusions any more sound.
Forgive me for relating the following story about the Indian
mathematical genius Ramanujan, who was in hospital in England, about
to die of tuberculosis, when the mathematician G. H. Hardy visited
him. The following is taken from C. P. Snow's foreword to Hardy's
book, "A mathematician's apology":
Hardy used to visit him, as he lay dying in hospital at Putney.
It was on one of those visits that there happened the incident of
the taxi-cab number. Hardy had gone out to Putney by taxi, as
usual his chosen method of conveyance. He went into the room where
Ramanujan was lying. Hardy, always inept about introducing a
conversation, said, probably without a greeting, and certainly as
his first remark: `I thought the number of my taxi-cab was 1729.
It seemed to me a rather dull number.' To which Ramanujan
replied: `No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number.
It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in
two different ways.'
I can't help wondering how many interesting patterns Ramanujan would
have been able to spot, given just about any sequence of words and
numbers.
Stein
-- Stein A. Strømme --- Matematisk institutt, Universitetet i Bergen e-post: stromme@math.uib.no telefon: 5558 4825 telefax: 5558 9672