...and they made a biopic on Ramanujan!
Newton didn't "invent" gravity, he just 'discovered' the phenomenon.
Moreover, it's supposed to be a biopic on a great mathematician while there's hardly any maths in it! just blah blah and same blah about "i need proofs" for 1729 hours and nothing else.
Why couldn't you put the bunny back in the box?
Why do people get their panties in a twist over this line? He's just trying to impress and inspire some awe in Ramanujan. It's a little cheeky. Besides, Newton invented a theory of gravitation; he didn't discover a phenomenon (as if people hadn't noticed the phenomenon before), but he invented a way of explaining that phenomenon, and it's great and useful but it's since been superseded as there are now more accurate models that have been invented.
shareLOL nobody "invented" gravity. Everyone knows that. However, Newton discovered the THEORY of it.
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Fear not for the future; weep not for the past -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
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I'm sorry you did not understand the greater aspects of the film, the beauty of Ramanujan's mathematics and how it relates to the all. There is actually much insight into the fundamentals of true mathematics in this film.
As for the invent and discovery argument, you may be surprised to know that most good physicists of the last hundred plus years would argue against you. Although I understand your angle, it is a common misunderstanding about what science and mathematics really are. These things are obviously relative to us. It could be said in plain English that Newton discovered gravity, and that is not wrong in some sense; However in the sense of the entirety, and as far as real science is concerned, it is basically wrong. Even many good scientists might side with your way of seeing,(But not most good physicists.) but still it is not as precise. In truth, Newton invented a formula to describe gravity from our very limited perspective of measurement.
Gravity is not something anyone discovered, it has always been as far as humans are concerned. However Newton did invent a formula that described some of the laws that gravity abides by from our perspective, and then later Einstein created(Invented) even more formula to describe the physical phenomenon to a greater degree. It is even wrong to call gravity a natural phenomenon from a true scientific perspective, though many scientists and reference tools still do. By using the word 'natural', vagueness and opinion is injected, therefore some truth of real understanding is actually lost. Most western academia is riddled with dogma, ignorance, arrogance, and vagueness, so much so that it's basically lost in terms of really understanding anything fundamental.
Is mathematics invented or discovered? Both could be said to be true, just as you say gravity was discovered, and as I've said, you're not entirely wrong. Scientifically however, mathematics is a human invention is a much more truthful statement to the way we generally know it. The way we understand math is not absolute, it is finite. Mathematics is a symbolic language invented by humans to measure relative things. Honestly though, the way that Ramanujan came about his formulas was much more pure, much more fundamental. He was not swayed or polluted by the formal and limited western thinking in our schools. He learned on his own, he related all things to the absolute. In other words, he related all things to the truth of the infinite. Western man thinks backwards, has been taught backwards. Rip things apart, break things down and see what they are made of, but you can break infinity into an infinite amount of parts quite obviously. Western thinkers generally understand how to describe the phenomenon, just like western doctors treat symptoms. The cause of things, or the entirety of things are beyond this limited way of thinking. As Bohr said, no things in truth are definable, all things that are physical are at least to some degree uncertain, always in motion, always changing. So much as to say that there really are no actual things at all. There is only one thing, that is if to say that the 'infinite one' is a thing at all!
An excerpt from - Where Do the Laws of Physics Come from? by Victor Stenge
We now have a deep and revolutionary understanding of the true nature of the mathematical quantities and theories of physics. We have realized that they are basically human inventions, including the notions of time and space. The quantities of physics are defined by how we measure them. The laws of physics are not, as usually assumed, restrictions on the behavior of matter--handed down from above or somehow built into the logical structure of the Universe. Rather, they are restrictions on the way that physicists may formulate their theories.