Wasted genius

Wasted genius
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
April 23, 2006

The film being made on Ramanujan will help us nurture and encourage our prodigies better.

The partnership between Ramanujan and Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College, was as unlikely as it was productive.

THE news that the British actor-director Stephen Fry and our own Dev Benegal will co-write and direct a new film about the tragic mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan is both welcome and worrying. Welcome, because Ramanujan's story deserves to be told for a mass audience; worrying, because the obstacles in the realisation of such a project are so great that one fears the tragedy of the genius' life and death might be compounded by the further disappointment of never seeing the movie made.
And what a story it is! In January 1913, a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras, with no university education, sent the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy nine pages of closely written mathematical formulae, in a rounded schoolboy script. The letter offered startling conclusions on such arcana as divergent series and the negative values of gamma function — and refuted one of Hardy's own papers. At first Hardy thought the author might be a crank; but after studying the theorems he realised that they "could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class... They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them."
Prodigious output

The letter offered only a foretaste of the prodigious calculations to come. For Ramanujan, born so poor that he could not afford paper to record his formulae (he wrote many of his calculations in chalk on a slate and erased them with his elbow; sometimes he would write in red ink on paper already written upon) was now summoned to Cambridge, where he embarked on a brilliant career that brought him the world's greatest mathematical honours — and led to his death at the age of 32. When Ramanujan died, at the height of his powers, he left a final notebook full of formulae — 650 theorems devised as his body was being inexorably consumed by tuberculosis. It was a tragedy, his doctor later wrote, "too deep for tears".
A film of this tragedy must vividly portray Ramanujan's humble birth (and a childhood marked by questions like "how far is it between clouds?"), his strong-willed mother, his schoolboy brilliance (a headmaster declared that he "deserved higher than the maximum possible marks"), his Hindu religious convictions ("an equation", Ramanujan once said, "has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."). And it must not gloss over the years of neglect and penury until his persistence found him patrons for a shoestring stipend, a clerical job — and the letter to Cambridge that transformed his life.
It is appropriate that the film should be an Indo-British collaboration. The partnership between Ramanujan, a short, dark Tamil with a pockmarked face and glowing eyes, and Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College, cricket player and perfectionist who prided himself on the "uselessness" of his purist mathematics, was as unlikely as it was productive. Papers flowed from them amidst the ravages of World War I; Hardy polished the rougher edges of his partner's genius and ensured its public acceptance. Ramanujan came up with a succession of astonishing insights that others have proven since. Eminent scholars have devoted decades to the study of Ramanujan's notebooks, and the task is still unfinished. Ramanujan's work retains a compelling relevance; his theorems have found applications in a variety of fields, from computer science to cryptology, particle physics to plastics, statistical mechanics to space travel. President Abdul Kalam has even presented the film's makers with a paper he has written on Ramanujan's theories on secure communications.
Striking stories
I hope the filmmakers will include amongst their scenes my favourite stories of Ramanujan's genius. Attending his first Cambridge lecture and asked by a professor whether he wanted to add anything, Ramanujan went to the blackboard and wrote results the professor had not yet proved — and which he could not have known before. In one episode, Hardy visited his ailing protégé in a nursing home and commented that the license number of the cab he had come in, 1729, was "rather a dull number." Ramanujan reacted instantly. "No, Hardy. It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
Ramanujan was convinced, from reading the lines on his palm, that he would die before he was 35. Auto-suggestion in such a religious man could well have had a powerful effect; Ramanujan always saw mathematics as a divine gift, bestowed upon him by his family deity, the goddess Namagiri, in his dreams. Loneliness, neglect and poor eating habits in an unfamiliar climate also took their toll. Tuberculosis was a common affliction among Indian students in England, and Ramanujan, obsessed by his work, unable to find vegetarian food in an England of wartime shortages, simply wasted away. The enormity of this preventable loss is unbearably moving.
Ramanujan had, in Hardy's words, "a profound and invincible originality," but he was still heir to an ancient Indian mathematical tradition that has given the world its misnamed "Arabic" numerals, that invented the zero in the second century B.C., and that flowered in the theorems of Aryabhatta in the fifth century A.D., Brahmagupta in the seventh and Bhaskara in the 12th. Yet he would never have approached the eminence he did were it not for his discovery by (or perhaps one should say of) Hardy. Poverty and colonialism can well be blamed: but today's India must do better at identifying and nurturing new Ramanujans. It took an Englishman, J.B.S. Haldane, to observe that "if Ramanujan's work had been recognised in India as early as it was in England, he might never have emigrated" — and might have lived to achieve even more. It is a shame that the handful of Indian-born Nobel Prize-winning scientists all triumphed abroad rather than in the land of their birth. Perhaps the film will help change that.