I discovered Ramanujam - the man who knew infinity

I rediscovered Ramanujam (Born 1887, Died 1920) and how!

You ask an average Indian who Ramanujam was and you could end up with a blank stare.

 A small number of people might say he was a famous mathematician. 

A much smaller number might say, yes, they are aware of the Ramanujam number 1729 (the smallest number that could be expressed as a sum of two different cubes 10^3+9^3 and 12^3+1^3) and a really miniscule number would say he was possibly the greatest genius this country has produced.

This is my journey from the second group to the third and my discovery of the genius.

A few years back, the movie “ The man who knew infinity” was released. Some of our friends saw it and liked it, we did not. It did not seem worth spending money and time in a theatre on…

A few weeks back, when it was being aired on TV, I saw it. It was aired again and I saw it again. There was something incredible about this man, Ramanujam. Curiosity evoked, I read Robert Kanigel’s book which the movie is based on.

Was I spellbound?

Yes, for sheer drama, very few life stories would equal that of Ramanujam. 

Born in a really poor family, having no assets except for his Brahminism (of course a potent weapon in that era), having only one love in life – mathematics and having the notorious reputation for failing in every examination after his 10^th standard, makes an interesting concoction.

To understand the greatness of Ramanujam, one has to understand his context. Born in the British era, in a small village called Kumbakonam in the then Madras Presidency, his fate was almost sealed when he was born – retire as an accountant or a temple priest.

But, God willed otherwise. With extremely minimal exposure to modern mathematics (the only books he read were SL Loney’s trigonometry (1893) and G S Carr’s Synopsis of Pure Mathematics (1860)), with his incredible and unimaginable genius he came up with formulae and hypotheses that the very best in the world could scarcely imagine.

Let me help by setting up a parallel story.

Imagine a teenager studying in the hinterland of India whose only access to computer programming is a book on Fortran or Pascal (what students studied 30 years back) coming up with break-though ideas that could be used in Artificial Intelligence or in the Internet of Things! Unbelievable, right?

Now, imagine further. No one in the teenager’s society can understand a word of what he says or speaks. But, the teenager knows that he is endowed with knowledge that cannot go waste.

So, he sends handwritten manuscripts to the likes of Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Continue imagining - Many dismiss the letters as hoax or as crank theories to be trashed. But, luckily one of them sees a genius in the manuscript.

This is Ramanujam’s story. When no one in India could understand what he wrote, he sent handwritten letters to the best mathematicians of London at that time. While many dismissed his entreaties, one man saw them for what they were – GH Hardy.

Professor Hardy could scarcely believe his luck when he saw genius poring out of every page of a long letter he received from a clerk in Madras, India.

If we know Ramanujam today, the credit for that would solely go to Professor Hardy. He ensured Ramanujam relocated to the Cambridge University, instilled in him the discipline of western thinking to complement his genius. The rest, as they say, is history.

It took a foreigner to see the hidden jewel in the ordinariness that pervaded the country’s educational system then. If not for GH Hardy, we would never have known that we had a genius in our midst.

The Ramanujam story is also one of grit and unrelenting focus in the most adverse of circumstances. Despite abject poverty (he had to depend on friends for his food, many times he did not have enough paper to write his theorems) and lack of a conducive environment he kept pursuing mathematics. Penury, paucity – nothing stopped his passion.

If Hardy was the hero, there was a villain too. Difficult to believe, especially in the Indian context, but, his mother.

When he went to England, Ramanujam was a loner, missing his vegetarian food, the warmth of a family and a home. While professionally prospering, at a personal level he was suffering and slowly dying. His health deteriorated and so did his will to live.

By pilfering letters sent to his wife by him, and not letting her join Ramanujam in England, his mother committed the gravest of crimes. Would he have died so young if his wife were with him in England?

We will never know what else Ramanujam could have achieved if he had lived longer.  

Would he have cracked the DNA code? Or the mutations that result in cancer? Or a model to predict rainfall better?

This incompleteness makes his life’s story a compelling one.

This a story worth making for the likes of Netflix. If the narcotics cartels of South America and the Royals of Great Britain can be brought to life by them, there is definitely a Ramanujam story waiting to be told, in great detail!