At first I thought the comments saying "this is not a proof" were being sarcastic, but I guess readers are simply not aware.<p>Ramanajuan derived a lot of his mathematical writings from intuition and seldom had proofs to the level of Western expectations.<p>It's nice that his "lost" formulae have been verified, but more important would be an understanding of the intuition behind them.<p>I'm hoping that would lead to tools for lighter-weight proofs than the recent heavy-weight and impenetrable Weil et al proofs.
I don't really understand this article. It reads like pop science because of all the elided details, but no layperson could possibly understand it. But I'm not sure how much an expert would really out of it either. The stuff about "having solutions for a particular function" is just nonsense.<p>Also, can <i>anyone</i> actually decipher the handwritten stuff?
Here's their method:<p>>First, calculate a numerical value for the point of interest. Second, conjecture a closed algebraic form for this number. Third, express the algebraic number as nested radicals. Finally, check the conjectured form with many digits of accuracy.<p>But this isn't a proof. It's just empirical evidence. At least it seems to me - I'm no mathematician.