The Ramanujan machine is a specialised software package, developed by a team of scientists at the Technion: Israeli Institute of Technology, to discover new formulas in mathematics. It has been named after the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan because it supposedly imitates the thought process of Ramanujan in his discovery of hundreds of formulas. [1] [2] [3] [4] The machine has produced several conjectures in the form of continued fraction expansions of expressions involving some of the most important constants in mathematics like e and π (pi). Some of these conjectures produced by the Ramanujan machine have subsequently been proved true. The others continue to remain as conjectures. The software was conceptualised and developed by a group of undergraduates of the Technion under the guidance of Ido Kaminer , an electrical engineering faculty member of Technion. The details of the machine were published online on 3 February 2021 in the journal Nature. [3]
According to George Andrews, an expert on the mathematics of Ramanujan, even though some of the results produced by the Ramanujan machine are amazing and difficult to prove, the results produced by the machine are not of the caliber of Ramanujan and so calling the software the Ramanujan machine is slightly outrageous. [5] [6] Doron Zeilberger, an Israeli mathematician, has opined that the Ramanujan machine is a harbinger of a new methodology of doing mathematics. [7]
The following are some of the formulas discovered by the Ramanujan machine which have been later proved to be true: [3]
The following are some of the many formulas conjectured by the Ramanujan machine whose truth or falsity has not yet been established: [8]
In the last expression, the numbers 4, 14, 30, 52, . . . are defined by the sequence for and the numbers 8, 72, 288, 800, . . . are generated using the formula for .
The number e, also known as Euler's number, is a mathematical constant approximately equal to 2.71828 that can be characterized in many ways. It is the base of natural logarithms. It is the limit of (1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity, an expression that arises in the computation of compound interest. It can also be calculated as the sum of the infinite series
In mathematics, the gamma function is one commonly used extension of the factorial function to complex numbers. The gamma function is defined for all complex numbers except the non-positive integers. For every positive integer n,
The number π is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159. The number π appears in many formulae across mathematics and physics. It is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers, although fractions such as are commonly used to approximate it. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends, nor enters a permanently repeating pattern. It is a transcendental number, meaning that it cannot be a solution of an equation involving only finite sums, products, powers, and integers. The transcendence of π implies that it is impossible to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle with a compass and straightedge. The decimal digits of π appear to be randomly distributed, but no proof of this conjecture has been found.
In mathematics, a square root of a number x is a number y such that ; in other words, a number y whose square is x. For example, 4 and −4 are square roots of 16 because .
In mathematics, the trigonometric functions are real functions which relate an angle of a right-angled triangle to ratios of two side lengths. They are widely used in all sciences that are related to geometry, such as navigation, solid mechanics, celestial mechanics, geodesy, and many others. They are among the simplest periodic functions, and as such are also widely used for studying periodic phenomena through Fourier analysis.
In mathematics, a continued fraction is an expression obtained through an iterative process of representing a number as the sum of its integer part and the reciprocal of another number, then writing this other number as the sum of its integer part and another reciprocal, and so on. In a finite continued fraction, the iteration/recursion is terminated after finitely many steps by using an integer in lieu of another continued fraction. In contrast, an infinite continued fraction is an infinite expression. In either case, all integers in the sequence, other than the first, must be positive. The integers are called the coefficients or terms of the continued fraction.
In mathematics, Catalan's constantG, is defined by
In mathematics, a cube root of a number x is a number y such that y3 = x. All nonzero real numbers have exactly one real cube root and a pair of complex conjugate cube roots, and all nonzero complex numbers have three distinct complex cube roots. For example, the real cube root of 8, denoted , is 2, because 23 = 8, while the other cube roots of 8 are and . The three cube roots of −27i are
The Basel problem is a problem in mathematical analysis with relevance to number theory, concerning an infinite sum of inverse squares. It was first posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1650 and solved by Leonhard Euler in 1734, and read on 5 December 1735 in The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Since the problem had withstood the attacks of the leading mathematicians of the day, Euler's solution brought him immediate fame when he was twenty-eight. Euler generalised the problem considerably, and his ideas were taken up more than a century later by Bernhard Riemann in his seminal 1859 paper "On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude", in which he defined his zeta function and proved its basic properties. The problem is named after Basel, hometown of Euler as well as of the Bernoulli family who unsuccessfully attacked the problem.
In complex analysis, a branch of mathematics, a generalized continued fraction is a generalization of regular continued fractions in canonical form, in which the partial numerators and partial denominators can assume arbitrary complex values.
William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker FRS was an Anglo-Irish peer and mathematician who served as the president of the Royal Society from 1662 to 1677. Best known for introducing Brouncker's formula, he also worked as a civil servant, serving as a commissioner in the Royal Navy. Brouncker was a friend and colleague of Samuel Pepys, and features prominently in the Pepys' diary.
In mathematics, Gelfond's constant, named after Aleksandr Gelfond, is eπ, that is, e raised to the power π. Like both e and π, this constant is a transcendental number. This was first established by Gelfond and may now be considered as an application of the Gelfond–Schneider theorem, noting that
In mathematics, the lemniscate constantϖ is a transcendental mathematical constant that is the ratio of the perimeter of Bernoulli's lemniscate to its diameter, analogous to the definition of π for the circle. Equivalently, the perimeter of the lemniscate is 2ϖ. The lemniscate constant is closely related to the lemniscate elliptic functions and approximately equal to 2.62205755. The symbol ϖ is a cursive variant of π; see Pi § Variant pi.
Approximations for the mathematical constant pi in the history of mathematics reached an accuracy within 0.04% of the true value before the beginning of the Common Era. In Chinese mathematics, this was improved to approximations correct to what corresponds to about seven decimal digits by the 5th century.
In mathematics, sine and cosine are trigonometric functions of an angle. The sine and cosine of an acute angle are defined in the context of a right triangle: for the specified angle, its sine is the ratio of the length of the side that is opposite that angle to the length of the longest side of the triangle, and the cosine is the ratio of the length of the adjacent leg to that of the hypotenuse. For an angle , the sine and cosine functions are denoted simply as and .
In the analytic theory of continued fractions, Euler's continued fraction formula is an identity connecting a certain very general infinite series with an infinite continued fraction. First published in 1748, it was at first regarded as a simple identity connecting a finite sum with a finite continued fraction in such a way that the extension to the infinite case was immediately apparent. Today it is more fully appreciated as a useful tool in analytic attacks on the general convergence problem for infinite continued fractions with complex elements.
The square root of 5 is the positive real number that, when multiplied by itself, gives the prime number 5. It is more precisely called the principal square root of 5, to distinguish it from the negative number with the same property. This number appears in the fractional expression for the golden ratio. It can be denoted in surd form as:
The Rogers–Ramanujan continued fraction is a continued fraction discovered by Rogers (1894) and independently by Srinivasa Ramanujan, and closely related to the Rogers–Ramanujan identities. It can be evaluated explicitly for a broad class of values of its argument.
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