Abstract
The famous French mathematician Pierre Fermat, like Ramanujan, made notes of his observations without proofs and communicated his findings in letters to contemporaries. In this article a comparison is made of certain mathematical contributions of Fermat and Ramanujan, and of their mathematical tastes. The famous Ramanujan taxi-cab equation is discussed as a Diophantine equation in four variables having solutions, but this equation becomes the cubic version of Fermat’s Last Theorem when one of the variables is set equal to zero, in which case there are no non-trivial solutions.
This article appeared in The Hindu, India’s National Newspaper, in January 1995.
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© 2013 Springer India
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Alladi, K. (2013). Fermat and Ramanujan: A Comparison. In: Ramanujan's Place in the World of Mathematics. Springer, India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-0767-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-0767-2_5
Publisher Name: Springer, India
Print ISBN: 978-81-322-0766-5
Online ISBN: 978-81-322-0767-2
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