An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.
Mark Kac, Polish mathematician, writing about Ramanujan
A passion for maths
Srinivas Ramanujan was born in present-day Tamil Nadu, India. In many ways he was unexceptional. In his childhood, he stood out for two reasons: he was on the large size and he loved maths. Academically, he failed many times. He was financed through at least two colleges but on both occasions he failed to get a degree. The degrees required competence in a variety of subjects. Ramanujan, however, was interested in maths only and completely neglected all his other studies.
Whilst growing up, his only guide was a dated maths textbook by G S Carr. The book inspired him. He filled notebook after notebook with maths formulas that no one understood. In his lone studies, Ramanujan came up with (or re-invented) many theorems. British and Indian mathematicians looked at his work. No one could work out whether he was a genius or a madman. And so he languished, in obscurity, in India, for many years.
England
When all seemed lost, after letters to several mathematicians in the UK, one person replied. G H Hardy, a Cambridge mathematician, took Ramanujan seriously. They began corresponding. Hardy saw some of Ramanujan’s theorems. However, when asked to provide proofs, Ramanujan didn’t. He had read only Carr’s textbook. He thought Carr’s presentation was the way to present his findings. Carr’s method provided conclusions with minimal, if any, proof. Hardy initially thought Ramanujan was reluctant to provide proofs in case his ideas were stolen. Despite being frustrated, Hardy persevered and eventually persuaded Ramanujan to come to Cambridge.
Ramanujan’s life in Cambridge was the best thing that happened to him — and the worst. It brought him fame and honours but it also contributed to his early death.
Isolation
The time in Cambridge was spent often alone and lonely. The reserve of Cambridge academics gave him little emotional outlet. Equally hard, Ramanujan faced internal feuding between his mother and his new bride in India. This conflict meant that he was cut off from his wife. His mother withheld his wife’s letters. Ramanujan was a strict Brahmin. So strict that in coming to the UK, he violated custom by leaving India, which was forbidden for Brahmins. Being Brahmin, he was also a vegetarian. The food in 1914 England was too insipid for Ramanujan. He found it difficult to find the spicy vegetarian Indian food he craved.
Ramanujan was sensitive, a child-man, innocent, eager to please and easily offended. Once, he cooked for some friends. When one of the guests declined a third helping, Ramanujan, unknown to them, left the flat. He got on a train and disappeared to Oxford — such was his shame at someone refusing his food.
Social isolation in Cambridge, poor food choices, and the lack of communication with his family in India all contributed to the deterioration of his physical and mental health. He spent many months in and out of sanatoriums, which were a combination of convalescent homes and hospitals. Suspected of contracting tuberculosis, he was treated with various quack remedies. They were the best available in the era before antibiotics. Being left in cold conditions (in a country he already found cold), ill-fed, and other rostrums made Ramanujan worse.
We now know the sanatoriums, despite their good intentions, often did more harm than good.
Everything came to a head when Ramanujan attempted to take his life on the London Underground. He was miraculously saved by a quick thinking staff member who stopped the coming train.
Dreams and visions
Ramanujan had dreams and visions. On more than one occasions, he interpreted other people’s dreams for them, including correctly predicting the death of someone. He himself predicted at an early age that he would die before he was thirty-five.
Once the Great War ended and Ramanujan was well enough to travel, he sailed back to India. But by then it was almost too late. He had lost a lot of weight and looked moribund.
There, his mother went to a mathematician who was also a noted astrologer. She showed him Ramanujan’s horoscope. After studying the chart for a while, he said one of two things will happen. Either the person will achieve a worldwide reputation and die at the height of his fame. Alternatively, if he did live long, he would remain obscure. “Who is this gentleman? What is his name?”, the mathematician/astrologer asked. He didn’t know he was speaking to Ramanujan’s mother.
Ramanujan had little money all his life. He wanted only acknowledgement for his work not wealth. When in India, he was given an income by Cambridge and an Indian university. He asked them to give him the modest amount he needed to live. The rest should be used to help educate poor children.
Death
In April 1920, Ramanujan became unconscious. His wife sat with him, feeding him sips of diluted milk. But it was too late.
One of the many doctors who treated him in India said, after Ramanujan’s death, that his squabbling wife and mother greatly contributed to his death.
The often quoted line from Blade Runner, “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”, applies to Ramanujan possibly more than anyone else.
Reputation
After his death, Ramanujan was claimed by everyone. Ramanujan’s birthday, 22 Dec, is now celebrated in India as National Mathematics Day. His was a story of rags to intellectual riches. Hardy once called Ramanujan “my discovery”. But really Ramanujan belonged to no one. He was, as someone put it, a svayambhu — “self-born”. He had sprouted up out of the soil of India of his own accord. He had created himself.
Ramanujan was self-willed, self-driven and self-directed. But the education system in India (under the British Raj) had let him down. Hardy said Ramanujan’s early school failures were “the worst instance that I know of the damage that can be done by an inefficient and inelastic educational system.”
Echoing Hardy, Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, wrote:
Ramanujan’s brief life and death are symbolic of conditions in India. Of our millions how few get any education at all; how many live on the verge of starvation … If life opened its gates to them and offered them food and healthy conditions of living and education and opportunities of growth, how many among these millions would be eminent scientists, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers, and artists, helping to build a new India and a new world?
The mathematician E H Neville, in the unaired notes to a radio lecture on Ramanujan, paid this tribute:
Ramanujan’s career, just because he was a mathematician, is of unique importance in the development of relations between India and England. India has produced great scientists, but Bose and Raman were educated outside India, and no one can say how much of their inspiration was derived from the great laboratories in which their formative years were spent and from the famous men who taught them. India has produced great poets and philosophers, but there is a subtle tinge of patronage in all commendation of alien literature. Only in mathematics are the standards unassailable, and therefore of all Indians, Ramanujan was the first whom the English knew to be innately the equal of their greatest men. The mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, the offensive assumption that has survived countless humanitarian arguments and political appeals and poisoned countless approaches to collaboration between England and India, was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
If you’re religious, Ramanujan was a gift of the gods. If you’re not, you will wonder what he meant when he often said he was inspired by the gods. In the language of the Polish mathematician Mark Kac, Ramanujan was a “magician” rather than an “ordinary genius” (see quote at beginning).
It’s easy to see the tragedy of Ramanujan’s life. If only he had been educated, if only he’d met Hardy earlier, if only he hadn’t been poor, if only he was born now, if only he was looked after better in Britain. All those could have happened but Ramanujan was working on a different plane. It would have taken someone extraordinary to recognise his talents. To most he was an alien. And imagine a world where Ramanujan had not existed. Even if Ramanujan had only a few productive years, the small part of the world inhabited by pure mathematicians is still far better off .
With the help of various mathematicians, but principally Hardy, Ramanujan went on to publish many papers. His genius became widely recognised and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
To this day, mathematicians are still discovering how extraordinary Ramanujan was. He had sown many seeds in his notebooks and mathematicians are still reaping the rewards today. Not too long ago, someone proved one of Ramanujan’s conjectures. They won the Field Medal, the highest achievement in mathematics — the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Ramanujan is the gift that keeps on giving.
[Much of the above, quoted or not, comes from Robert Kanigel’s book on Ramanujan: The Man Who Knew Infinity. Kanigel is the perfect biographer. If you want to see how a story about a mathematician can be a page-turner, read the book. There is also a film of the same title, which I’ve not seen yet.]