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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Kanigel say prevented Ramanujan from getting the care he needed?
(a) The fight between his wife and mother.
(b) His family's poverty.
(c) The Great War.
(d) His distance from the cultural centers.

2. What obstacle stood in the way of Hardy's plan?
(a) Ramanujan's poverty.
(b) Ramanujan's inability to get a passport.
(c) Ramanujan's intractability.
(d) Ramanujan's resistance to sea travel.

3. In his letter to Hardy, what did Ramanujan say he had discovered?
(a) A theory of relativity.
(b) A solution to a problem Hardy proposed.
(c) A mistake in Hardy's theorems.
(d) A function for using irrational numbers in multi-variable calculus.

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

5. To what extent does Kanigel say Ramanujan blended in with Cambridge society?
(a) He was always in between cultures.
(b) Not very much.
(c) Thoroughly.
(d) He remained hostile to it.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Kanigel say Ramanujan passed his time on the ship?

2. How did Ramanujan spend all his time on returning to India?

3. How does Kanigel describe the trip to England?

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

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

Short Essay Questions

1. What accolades did Ramanujan receive for his work?

2. What was Ramanujan's relationship with Cambridge after he left for India?

3. What is a formalist in mathematical thinking?

4. Where did Ramanujan go when he reached England?

5. What has been the impact of Ramanujan's work?

6. How was Ramanujan treated on his return to India?

7. In what way was Ramanujan's experience of England similar to Ghandi's?

8. What did Ramanujan discover when P. C. Mahalanobis read him a puzzle one evening?

9. What was Ramanujan's interest in pi?

10. What was Ramanujan's Master Theorem intended to do?

(see the answer keys)

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