World Famous Anecdotes
(Sukdev Prasad)
SHRINIVAS RAMANUJAN
BANARAS
This is a very interesting story from the childhood of that great mathematician Shrinivas Ramanujan. The teacher was taking arithmetic class and Ramanujan was a small child at that time. The teacher drew three bananas on the blackboard and asked? if we have three bananas and three are three students, how many bananas will each child get??
A boy replied instantly, ?Each student will get a banana.? The teacher said absolutely correct,?
The teacher was going to explain the procedure of division further, that a boy stood up and asked,? Sir, if the bananas are not distributed to any child, will his share be still one bananas?? that boy was Ramanujan.
Hearing this, all the students burst in loud laughter. Many even said that it was a silly question. The teacher thumped the table to restore the discipline and said. ?There is nothing to laugh at; I will tell you what this child wants to know.? The teacher further elucidated that this child wanted to know whether the result would be one, if zero is divided by zero.
The teacher then explained that in this case the answer would be zero. He informed the students that this was a very complicated question in arithmetic and it took the mathematicians hundreds of years to arrive at the correct answer. Some thought that if zero was divided by zero the result would be zero, while another set of mathematicians argued that the answer would be one. In the end, the famous Indian scientist Bhasker solved the problem. He proved that if zero is divided by zero, the result would be infinity.
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