Summary: (http://kamlashow.com/content/5006/featurephotos/lowres/profdyson.jpg)Professor Freeman Dyson (http://www.sns.ias.edu/%7Edyson/) talks about Srinvasa Iyengar Ramanujan (http://www.usna.edu/Users/math/meh/ramanujan.html), the well-known Indian, who studied and worked with Prof. Hardy at Cambridge University during the early part of the 20th century. Ramanujan was only 32 years old when he supposedly died of tuberculosis. Prof. Dyson points out this might not be the case; Ramanujan may have instead died of amebiasis of liver, a common and treatable ailment. Prof. Dyson (http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/10/09/dyson/) studied under Prof. GH Hardy (http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Hardy.html) in Cambridge University, and worked on Ramanujan's partition of numbers (http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050618/bob9.asp). Prof. Dyson first discovered Ramanujan from ET Bell's book "Men of Mathematics," while he was a student at Winchester (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_College). Incidentally this was the same school where Prof. Hardy studied. An English-born physicist, Professor Dyson (http://www.wired.com/wired/6.02/dyson.html) is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies' School of Natural Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a fellow of the Royal Society (just as Ramanujan was) and member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. In 2000 Prof. Dyson was awarded the Templeton Prize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templeton_Prize). A prolific thinker and writer, Prof. Dyson has written many books including Disturbing the Universe, Weapons and Hope, Infinite in all Directions, Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds, The Sun, and The Genome and The Internet. He also is part of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Prof. Dyson has six children. His daughter Esther Dyson (http://www.release1-0.com/), an influential expert in emerging digital technology, is editor at large at C|Net. She was also the founding chairperson of ICANN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN). This interview was recorded at Columbia University, New York and was originally published on October 2, 2006.
