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Showing posts from December, 2022

A story of a Tamil Brahmin boy, who failed in his degree!

G.H Hardy a well-known British mathematician received a letter, which was of 11 pages of complex mathematical theorems. At first, he thought it was another fraud letter he had received. After discussing with one of his colleagues at Cambridge university, he came to the conclusion that this letter was one hell of a genius work.   G.H.Hardy Back in India, almost a decade before the letter received at Cambridge, a Genius boy was roaming around the streets of Madras, finding it difficult to focus on all subjects of college. even his parents kept a constable to make sure this guy attends his class. The boy went on to fail in his most of subjects and failed to attain a college degree. But one thing about the boy was fascinating, he knew numbers better than any human being. He continued his obsession and wrote many papers and even tried to publish with the help of some mathematicians in India. On the 16th of Jan 1913, he finally wrote a letter to G.H. Hardy.  Hardy wanted to meet Thi...

Survivors Bias, Dropping out of college isn't that great idea!

Let me tell you the story of world war 2, British were losing their bomber aircraft at an increasing rate against the German army, but they desperately wanted to find a solution to this problem, So they analyzed all the air crafts that came back. They noted and found out the areas of the aircraft where most of the bullets were hit or damage happened, and they decided to armor those parts of the aircraft, sounds intuitive, isn’t it? But to their surprise, the applied mathematics department had a different plan (I was shocked by the fact that they had applied mathematics in the military) So Abraham Wald, based on his statistical research suggested the British military, Armor those parts of the aircraft where no damage is seen or observed, but this brought huge success in coming war days. The reason behind this counterintuitive decision was that they were only looking at the aircraft which returned. means that all the aircraft hit by German in different areas failed to return, so all surv...