Chapter 2 Ranging with Delight Summary and Analysis

In 1903, when Ramanujan was 16, he somehow got a hold of a copy of A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics. The book, written by a English mathematician named George Shoobridge Carr, was a collection of more than five thousand equations, theorems, and formulas that had originally served as Carr's tutoring notes when he was a private math tutor in London. The book is notable because although there is a logical flow to the elements of the book, there is little explanation of the solutions or the logic that goes into solving the various problems presented. A smart student would have to do the work themselves to see how the different formulas and equations in the book led from one to another. The book, in other words, did not have the painstaking proofs...