The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

by Robert Kanigel

“An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.” Baltimore

“An obligatory aspect of shame is the role discovery plays,” writes Leon Wurmser, a University of Maryland psychiatrist, in The Mask of Shame. “It is usually a more or less sudden exposure, and exposure that abruptly brings to light the discrepancy between expectation and failure.” The feeling is that of sudden, sharp, inescapable humiliation—of a yawning gap between who you say you are and who your failures reveal you to be, of an ugly stain upon your public face.

Many students put off attempting anything on their own account till they have mastered everything relating to their problem that has been done by others. The result is that but few ever acquire the knack of independent work.”

The word leisure has undergone a shift since the time Ramachandra Rao used it in this context. Today, in phrases like leisure activity or leisure suit, it implies recreation or play. But the word actually goes back to the Middle English leisour, meaning freedom or opportunity. And as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, it’s freedom not from but “to do something specified or implied” [emphasis added]. Thus, E. T. Bell writes of a famous seventeenth-century French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, that he found in the King’s service “plenty of leisure”—leisure, that is, for mathematics.

They demanded accuracy and speed in the manipulation of mathematical formulas, a shallow cleverness, perhaps, but not real insight.

For an orthodox Hindu—and Ramanujan came from a very orthodox Hindu family—traveling to Europe or America represented a form of pollution. It was in the same category as publicly discarding the sacred thread, eating beef, or marrying a widow. And, traditionally, it had the same outcome—exclusion from caste. That meant your friends and relatives would not have you to their homes. You could find no bride or bridegroom for your child. Your married daughter couldn’t visit you without herself risking excommunication. Sometimes, you couldn’t go into temples. You couldn’t even get the help of a fellow casteman for the funeral of a family member. Here was the grim, day-to-day meaning of the word outcaste.

At first glance there wasn’t, certainly nothing obvious. And yet, then again, there was something there, right in front of your eyes: as you kept on counting, you found more primes. There was no last prime, Euclid had proved as much twenty-three hundred years ago. “The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic,” Hardy would write, “and Euclid’s theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task”; just as you never run out of numbers, you never run out of primes.

Observed a student in a much later study: “The initial difficulty is to break the extraordinary reserve of the English people, their correct but cold behavior, formal, unemotional, courteous and decent to a degree, but detached, both to take sides or involve themselves.”

Whatever the proper assignment of credit, “We owe the theorem,” Littlewood would write, “to a singularly happy collaboration of two men, of quite unlike gifts, in which each contributed the best, most characteristic, and most fortunate work that was in him. Ramanujan’s genius did have this one opportunity worthy of it.”

“A character so remarkably free from the petty meannesses of human life … the most generous of men.” That’s what C. P. Snow once said of Hardy. Another time, he called him “freer from the emotion [of envy] than any man I have ever known.” Indeed, though Hardy deemed Ramanujan’s natural mathematical ability superior to his own, no hint survives of so much as a wisp of envy tainting his relationship with him.

Ramanujan’s religion, Hardy insisted, “was a matter of observance and not of intellectual conviction, and I remember well him telling me (much to my surprise) that all religions seemed to him more or less equally true

unconscious activity often plays a decisive part in discovery; that periods of ineffective effort are often followed, after intervals of rest or distraction, by moments of sudden illumination; that these flashes of inspiration are explicable only as the result of activities of which the agent has been unaware—the evidence for all this seems overwhelming

For almost twenty years, Hardy later told Erdos, their theorem seemed dead in the water, no progress being made in improving it. Then, in 1934, the problem was resurrected, and in 1939 Erdos and Mark Kac were led to a theorem that took it much further. It was only then that mathematicians could look back and pronounce the Hardy-Ramanujan paper of 1917 the founding document of the field that became known as probabilistic number theory.

With the approach of the centennial, the house became a pilgrimage site. Mathematicians passing through Madras paid her homage.

How many registrars in this country today, or for that matter how many vice chancellors of today, 100 years after Ramanujan was born, would give a failed pre-university student a research scholarship of what is now equivalent of Rs. 2000/- or Rs. 2500/- today? This is after 40 years of independence, when we can no longer blame a colonial power for not encouraging Indian talent.

He wanted nothing—and everything. He sought no wealth, certainly none beyond what he needed to carry out his work, and to give to his family what he felt was expected of him. He did crave respect, understanding, perhaps even a favorable judgment from history. But what Ramanujan wanted more, more than anything, was simply the freedom to do as he wished, to be left alone to think, to dream, to create, to lose himself in a world of his own making.

That, of course, is no modest wish at all. He wanted “leisure.” And he got it.