Story of Srinivas Ramanujan

In August 1900, David Hilbert addressed a team of mathematicians in Sorbonne, Paris. It was the dawn of a new century, the dawn of the atomic age. Hill presented 23 unresolved mathematical problems (24 by some count) to the audience, problems that varied in scope and precision and generally set the tone for mathematics for most part of the 20th Century. Now Hilbert was no mere chronicler of the more arcane conundrums of mathematics. He worked on some of the most fundamental problems in mathematics and his work set up the structure for mathematical treatment of Quantum physics.

This then was the man who was rated as 80 in a scale of 100 by no less a personality than G.H.Hardy. Hardy rated himself as 25 in this same scale. We have to take Hardy at face value on this since this was man neither given to false exaggerations of modesty nor one to have megalomanic visions of his own abilities. Hardy’s collaboration with Littlewood is considered one of the greatest in the history of science and his book, “A Mathematician’s Apology� is considered by many, including Graham Greene, as one of the finest expositions of what it meant to be a creative mind. In this rough and ready scale, where Hardy himself barely made the first quartile, the only man rated a perfect 100, the man who was in Hardy’s mind among the greatest mathematicians of all-time was Srinivas Ramanujan.

Ramanujan walked this earth for 33 years from 1887 to 1920, but lived for just 4 years. Like the forest blooms that briefly flower once in 100 years, he blossomed forth in full glory for a period of intense activity from 1913 to 1917, years that unfortunately coincided with the Great War.

There are any number of websites and links that provide the biographical details of Ramanujan including his discovery by Hardy and Littlewood and the drama that preceded his arrival in England. This article will not attempt to say clumsily or vaguely what has been said well and in detail by others.

Miraculous and incredible as Ramanujan’s discovery may seem, it was also because he had the right connections: he was born into the right caste and was educated in the right language. Though a college drop-out, he was still a Matriculate in a country where a full 27% of children do not even complete primary education in 2008. He found a ready audience in the Collector of Nellore who was willing to hear out what must have seemed mostly incomprehensible mathematical dirge. How many Indians even today will be able to meet their Local collector for even a serious issue like say a physical atrocity or drought-related problems. Ramanujan’s letter was rejected by two esteemed but essentially over-the-hill Cambridge Dons. But he was still able to write the letter in the first place, in a language that they and later Hardy could understand.

Ramanujan’s talent was understood in the vaguest possible ways even by the members of the Indian mathematical society. Even then, the aforementioned Collector provided him with financial support and sent him to Madras. Another Dy. Collector helped Ramanujan get his work published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. For someone from a feudal society like India, where Collectors appear to have powers of life and death and talent is a joke, this may appear to be from the realms of fantasy.

Ramanujan further applied to the Madras Port Trust for a clerkship which he was not qualified for, having not studied beyond his Matriculation. Despite this, on the basis of his mathematics which would have been largely incomprehensible, the Port Trust made an exception and gave him the job. Compare this with trying to get an exception in a passport office if you went in with two photo-copies of your school leaving certificate and the system wanted three.

Ramanujan was self-taught and self-created: One of his biographers called him a Swayambhu. But he was born into a system that acknowledged his worth even if it did not really comprehend it. The system provided an encouragement that, feeble as it was, was sufficient to propel Ramanujan to the highest levels in Mathematics and in the end, help him get the recognition, if not the reward, that was his due. In the 100 years since these events, the system has hardened and changed beyond recognition. The involvement and flexibility of the past have been replaced by a mercenary rigidness that will only engage with a corrupt mediocrity.

Some circles in India, more so in South Indian Brahminical societies, have often ascribed Ramanujan’s immense talent to some divine intervention. Ramanujan himself inadvertently encouraged matters by saying that Goddess Namagiri wrote the equations on his tongue or famously asserting that for him, an equation has no meaning unless it represented a thought of God. However to do so is to do him tremendous injustice, it is like dismissing a world-class sub 9.8s sprinter by saying all Africans have fast-twitch fibre in their muscles. It is to deny the hours of hard work that Ramanujan did in his early days in Trichy when he virtually a race of his own and single-handedly re-discovered over 150 years of European mathematics and some. Of course, the soundest proof we may have that no super-natural powers were involved in his mathematics is simply that he was often wrong.

Today no roads in India are named after Ramanujan nor is any great educational institute erected in his honour. More sadly, Ramanujan’s life and achievements left no lasting tradition of pure mathematics in India and the subsequent emergence of accomplished mathematicians including most recently Saxena, Katyal and Agarwal of the Prime Number Test fame have been as sudden and inexplicable as Ramanujan himself nearly 100 years back.

There have been many definitions of genius but there is broad consensus of one defining characteristic – irrepressibility. Other put it other way – talent does what it can, Genius what it must.. It was Hardy who wrote that a man who chooses to become a research scientist or academician does so not because he is not ambitious or because he wishes a life of prosperous obscurity. It is because he believes that in the toil of 10 or 20 years is an opportunity to push the boundaries of truth, to further unveil the beauties of the world, whether in Nature or in Science or in the Arts. Such a person would have to be a man of profound self-belief but also one of profound self-respect, a person who would accept no accomplishment short of one that was commensurate with his own talent. Such a man was Srinivas Ramanujan.