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Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

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  • Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?
• Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

• Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

  chenxiang > 11 hours ago

  Body:
  
  Hi everyone. Since the title is quite short, let me expand on it right here: I want to share a thought experiment about whether the author of the Voynich Manuscript could have been a "Ramanujan-style" anomaly.
  
  Let me start by introducing someone I find more and more absurd the more I think about him: Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was an Indian mathematician, born in 1887 and died in 1920, only 32 years old. He had almost no formal higher education in mathematics and taught himself from a book of formulas. Later he wrote to the British mathematician Hardy and enclosed a pile of formulas. Hardy first thought he was a madman, but the more he looked, the more shocked he became.
  
  Ramanujan left behind nearly 4,000 mathematical formulas, propositions, and results. Many had no derivation at all—just answers. He said a goddess told him in his dreams. At the time, many mathematicians couldn't understand them, and some even thought they were nonsense. But later? Most were proven correct, a few were wrong, and many remain unproven to this day. Even more absurdly, his work later showed up in modular forms, black hole entropy, string theory, and other fields. Hardy reportedly rated him 100 and himself 25.
  
  I've always felt Ramanujan was not a genius in the ordinary sense. Several things about him are too anomalous:
  
  No process: often no derivation, just the answer;
  
  Pure intuition: as if he could directly "see" the result in his head;
  
  Sustained output: not one lucky hit, but thousands of results;
  
  High accuracy: most were later confirmed to be correct;
  
  Ahead of his time: many results were only understood decades or centuries later;
  
  Mysterious origin: he said a goddess came to him in dreams; no one can explain how he did it.
  
  So some people say Ramanujan's existence shows that the upper limit of humanity is not a fixed ceiling, but a hole that is occasionally punched through by some anomaly.
  
  Then I thought of the Voynich Manuscript. It is a medieval book, carbon-dated to around 1404–1438. It is full of an unknown script, with illustrations of plants, astronomy, human figures, and so on. For centuries, no one has been able to decipher it. It is not simple gibberish, because its statistical features resemble those of natural language—word frequency, information entropy, and so on look like language. Who wrote it, what the script is, and why it was written remain a complete mystery.
  
  So I had a thought experiment: If Ramanujan could write down large numbers of formulas that no one understood at the time and that were later verified, could the author of the Voynich Manuscript also have been some kind of “Ramanujan-style” anomaly?
  
  Not Ramanujan in the mathematical sense, but rather: someone who had a system in his head that we still cannot decode, or who could directly “see” some kind of structure and wrote it down in an unknown script. We can't understand it, just as people at the time couldn't understand Ramanujan.
  
  If we put Ramanujan and the Voynich Manuscript author side by side, the shared ingredients might be:
  
  No process: Ramanujan had no derivations; the manuscript has no process we can read;
  
  Pure intuition: Ramanujan said a goddess came to him in dreams; the manuscript author may also have drawn on some kind of intuition or mystical system we don't understand;
  
  Sustained output: Ramanujan left nearly 4,000 results; the manuscript is also many pages of sustained writing;
  
  High accuracy / ahead of its time: Ramanujan has been verified; if there is real knowledge behind the manuscript, it might also be correct and ahead of its time—we just can't verify it;
  
  Mysterious origin: Ramanujan's source is mysterious; the manuscript's author, script, and purpose are all unknown.
  
  Of course, the biggest difference is: Ramanujan's work can be verified. A mathematical formula is either right or wrong, and later generations can prove it. The Voynich Manuscript cannot be verified. We haven't even found its encoding rules, so we have no idea whether there is real knowledge in it at all.
  
  So I'm not saying the manuscript is definitely real knowledge, nor that its author was definitely a second Ramanujan. I just think Ramanujan's existence suggests there may have been more than one of these “glitch accounts” in human history. Some left behind verifiable mathematics; others left behind a black box we still can't open.
  
  Could the Voynich Manuscript be that kind of black box? If there really is knowledge behind it, could its author also be a Ramanujan-style figure? Only instead of leaving verifiable formulas, he left a system we haven't been able to crack for centuries.
  
  I'm only 16, so this is just a speculation. I know there are probably many counterarguments, but I still wanted to put it out there as an idea.

• RE: Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

  Mark Knowles > 11 hours ago

  I think you have put forward a good and interesting argument. I wouldn't go as far as you have.
  
  However, I think is not unreasonable to argue that as the Voynich manuscript is a very unusual historical object the person who produced it may have been an unusual person with unusual abilities. If the person who wrote the manuscript was a true genius then it would make it that much harder to decipher.

• RE: Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

  JoJo_Jost > 11 hours ago

  The answer to “Could it be …?” is always “Yes.”
  
  如果只是问“有没有可能……”，答案永远是“有可能”。
  

  ---

  I find the cipher too unstructured given its complex structure, with too many exceptions—that doesn't fit with a genius.

• RE: Title: Could the Voynich Author be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

  ololololo > 11 hours ago

  It seems that the author’s knowledge, particularly the knowledge he presented in the book, was quite modern for his time. For example, he must have had some understanding of herbalism and astrology.
  I believe it is more likely that the author did not discover something great or anticipate some kind of discovery. Rather, he wanted to understand a topic that was atypical for the 15th century, but due to a lack of knowledge, he arrived at incorrect conclusions.
   
  Perhaps he was trying to engage in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Perhaps he wanted to learn more about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. However, back then, knowledge was rather limited, and so the author could explain it in his own way. 
  
  What about the cipher? Well, it’s most likely based on homophonic ciphers of that time, just made more complex in its own way.
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