Mazy's muddle: National Year of Mathematics

Glancing through some back-dated newspapers I read that Manmohan Singh has declared 2012 as the National Year of Mathematics to celebrate the 125th birth anniversary of the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

I’m sure we’re going to hear and read a lot about him this year. So I thought I’d share something with you right now.

Do you like writing letters to friends? I do. Do I like writing a letter as part of the class language class? No! The reason is that when I write to a friend I do it on email, and there is a spelling checker to correct me when I’m wrong, and even if the spellings or grammar are wrong, my friends wouldn’t mind. But in the class letter, every mistake gets a minus marking.

This year, as a personal tribute to Ramanujan, I’m going to enjoy writing letters even if I make mistakes. You see, Ramanujan was not very good at English at first, but he still wrote an eleven-page letter to the Cambridge Professor G H Harding. The letter’s contents impressed him so much that he got Ramanujan to Cambridge for further studies and research in mathematics.

Now tell me, if the eleven-page letter had 2200 characters in words and 150 mathematical symbols, what was the percentage of symbols in the letter?

Out of the maze: 6.3%. There were totally 2350 characters in the letter (2200 +150). 150 divided by 2350, multiplied by 100 gives the answer.