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In the July 8 SN: DNA traces many roads to domestication, seeking quantum supremacy, the 25th anniversary of the qubit, bones’ secret messages, how monkeys see faces, redating Homo sapiens, a record-breaking gas giant, strange dragonfly wings and more.
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The Power of Partitions
12/13/2002 - 15:52 NumbersJust a year before his death in 1920 at the age of 32, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan came upon a remarkable pattern in a special list of whole numbers.
The list represented counts of how many ways a given whole number can be expressed as a sum of positive integers. For example, 4 can be written as 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. Including 4 itself but...