Ramanujan would insist that its height was, of course, only relative: who could say how high it seemed to an ant or a buffalo? One time he asked how the world would look when first created, before there was anyone to view it. He took delight, too, in posing sly little problems: If you take a belt, he asked Viswanatha and his father, and cinch it tight around the earth’s twenty-five-thousand-mile-long equator, then let it out just 2π feet—about two yards—how far off the earth’s surface would it stand? Some tiny fraction of an inch? Nope, one foot.
