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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was the result of Ramanujan clinging to his cultural practices?
(a) He generated fear and hostility in those around him.
(b) He brought Indian culture to English intellectuals.
(c) He taught English students how to cook Indian dishes.
(d) He remained an outsider.

2. What value did Ramanujan work with at Cambridge?
(a) Avogadro's number.
(b) Real numbers.
(c) Chaitin's constant.
(d) Pi.

3. Who is NOT included in the list of people who have benefited from Ramanujan's work, in Kanigel's account?
(a) Engineers.
(b) Surgeons.
(c) Physicists.
(d) Computer scientists.

4. What were Ramanujan and Hardy looking for in their work on partitions?
(a) A theorem that demonstrated how partitions operate in series.
(b) A way to bridge partitions.
(c) A way to define the number of partitions precisely.
(d) A point at which partitions broke down for prime numbers.

5. What does Kanigel say was Ramanujan's greatest talent?
(a) His associative abilities.
(b) His intuition.
(c) His perception.
(d) His calculations.

6. Who did Ramanujan stay with in England?
(a) Neville.
(b) Euler.
(c) Hardy.
(d) John Littlewood.

7. How much of Ramanujan's work did Hardy believe was sound and original?
(a) Half to three quarters.
(b) Almost all of it.
(c) One to two thirds.
(d) Five to ten percent.

8. What was the doctor's diagnosis of Ramanujan's illness?
(a) Tuberculosis.
(b) Heart disease.
(c) Cancer.
(d) Depression.

9. What was Euler's contribution to understanding partitions?
(a) A functional approximation.
(b) Notes on the performance of nested square roots.
(c) A theorem about series.
(d) An algorithm, but without values.

10. How do people account for Ramanujan's self-assessment?
(a) Hardy's coldness.
(b) Ramanujan's naïveté.
(c) Ramanujan's arrogance.
(d) Overwork.

11. What did Ramanujan's Master Theorem attempt to do?
(a) Integrate finite integrals.
(b) Solve Fermat's Last Theorem.
(c) Formulate number theory.
(d) Reduce infinite series to prime numbers.

12. How does Kanigel describe Ramanujan's dress?
(a) English dress.
(b) A hybrid of Indian and English.
(c) A unique brand of slovenliness all his own.
(d) Traditional Indian dress.

13. What did Ramanujan discover when his friend Mahalanobis read a puzzle from the paper?
(a) The value of pi.
(b) The mystical nature of numbers.
(c) The constant that resolves series to prime numbers.
(d) A proof to all problems like that puzzle.

14. What was it that offended Ramanujan when he invited some friends to dinner?
(a) The men used salt.
(b) The women declined a third helping.
(c) The friends wanted to use silverware.
(d) The friends criticized his cooking.

15. Based on his letter, what was Hardy trying to determine about Ramanujan?
(a) How he had devised his theories.
(b) Where he was from.
(c) Whether he was a crank.
(d) Who his teachers had been.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Kanigel characterize Ramanujan's theorems and formulas?

2. When do mathematicians believe Ramanujan did his best work?

3. Who was absent from the dock when Ramanujan's ship came in?

4. How was Ramanujan treated on his return?

5. What practice does Kanigel say Ramanujan had difficulty adjusting to in England?

(see the answer keys)

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