Extra Dimensions

[Angrboda]

Ideas generated purely in dreams or imagination that didn't pan out tend to outnumber those that did by about infinity to one. Without something constraining the search, blind searching based on dreams or imagination is pointless .... If someone with no prior experience of music suddenly could compose symphonies after a blow to the head, then you would have some interesting questions; however, I suspect that even then, the answer would lie in the person's prior experiences [and evolved traits] rather than sheer imagination...

I like the cut of you jib madam...this guy though has given the mathematics world some problems as he gets surprisingly good results but his explanation for his success...wel let the man talk..

Ramanujan has been described as a person with a somewhat shy and quiet disposition, a dignified man with pleasant manners.[80] He lived a rather Spartan life while at Cambridge. Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as rigorously orthodox. Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family Goddess, Namagiri of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work,[81] and claimed to dream of blood drops that symbolised her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[82] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God."[83][84]

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Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902 and he went on to find his own method to solve the quartic. The following year, not knowing that the quintic could not be solved by radicals, he tried (and of course failed) to solve the quintic. In 1903 when he was 16, Ramanujan obtained from a friend a library-loaned copy of a book by G. S. Carr. The book was titled A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics and was a collection of 5000 theorems. Ramanujan reportedly studied the contents of the book in detail. The book is generally acknowledged as a key element in awakening the genius of Ramanujan.

(Moreover, mathematical truth may be an empirical part of our mental reality, making it possible to discover mathematical truth a priori without any non-natural and exceptional process, similar perhaps to a synesthesia in which the Platonic realm of pure math is introspectively accessible. [I've written on the subject here at AF.])