The Sad Story of India's Math Prodigy

Most of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s knowledge  came from a single mathematics book. He spent all of his time thinking  about math and little else. It's no wonder he flunked out of college - twice… Yet somehow, he found his way  to the University of Cambridge where he performed ground-breaking  research on mathematical problems.

Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in the town of Erode, south of Madras  (present-day Chennai) in South India. Ramanujan was born on December 22,  1887 in Erode, a town south of Madras, what's now called Chennai in South India. He was considered a miracle  child…the only one of his mother’s first four children to survive infancy.

He also survived an outbreak of smallpox. Poor health would afflict him his whole life  yet it never slowed down his passion. Math equations danced in his head  as if they appeared from thin air.

He believed his gifts came from  the Hindu goddess Namagiri. He used to go to the nearby Sarangapani "Temple as a boy to sketch complex mathematical  equations in chalk on stone slabs. As a teen, he got his hands on a copy  of a book of math theorems written by British mathematician George Carr which was  intended as a teaching aid for students.

However, many students found it  tough to read because it listed answers without showing the steps to get there. But for Ramanujan, this book  awakened the genius in him. Carr’s book was “like a crossword puzzle,  with its empty grids begging to be filled in”, as Robert Kanigel describes  in his biography on Ramanujan.

He had a natural intuition for math which  can be illustrated by this problem he solved. Imagine you're on a street with 50 to 500  houses. You're looking for a special house where the sum of all house numbers to  its left equals the sum to its right.

Can you find it? This actually happened on a street with 288  houses. The special house was number 204, with both sides totaling 20,706.

When the Indian statistician, P. C.  Mahalanobis asked Ramanujan about this problem that he read in a magazine,  Ramanujan thought for a moment and gave a formula that works for any number of  houses, not just between 50 and 500.

On a street with just 8 houses, house 6  is special because 1+2+3+4+5 equals 7+8. Ramanujan said he knew the  answer was a continued fraction, showing his unique ability to see  patterns that others would miss. He received a scholarship to study at  the reputable Government Arts College in his hometown.

of Kumbakonam. However, his obsession with math got in the way. He flunked his English composition paper, lost  his scholarship, and dropped out because his family couldn’t afford the 32 rupee tuition per  term, a substantial amount of money at the time.

His father worked as a clerk in a sari shop  and never made more than 20 rupees a month. Ramanujan felt humiliated and ran away from home. He gave university another shot, but failed the entrance exams administered  by the University of Madras again and again.

He scored less than 10% on the physiology exam. A former student whom he tutored in  math recalled his state of remind, “. .

. he used to bemoan his wretched conditions  in life…he would reply that many a great man like Galileo died in inquisition and  his lot would be to die in poverty. But I continued to encourage him that God,  who is great, would surely help him…” His failures turned out to be a blessing in disguise because now he could  focus on his one true passion.

He educated himself with that outdated  math book and began feverishly stuffing his notebooks with new formulas of his  own, totaling nearly 4,000 in his lifetime. He started to build a reputation after  publishing his work in the first academic journal dedicated to mathematics in  India, the Indian Mathematical Society. But it wasn’t long before he had to find a job.

At the age of 21, Ramanujan's parents arranged his marriage to nine-year-old Janaki a distant  relative. Such customs were common then. He began working as an accounting  clerk at the Port of Madras, a big shipping hub known  today as the Port of Chennai.

As luck would have it, his direct  supervisor happened to be a mathematician, and the head of the port was a British engineer. They encouraged him to write to English  mathematicians about his discoveries. But two esteemed Cambridge  mathematicians rejected him.

However, a third was intrigued. In January 1913, G. H.

Hardy, a  fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, received  a letter from Ramanujan that read: Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in  the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum.  I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education…After leaving school  I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics.

I have made  a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed  by the local mathematicians as "startling". The ‘startling’ claim is that adding  up all positive integers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, to infinity added up to -1/12. Bear in mind, this isn't your typical addition.

Divergent series emerge from a  complex mathematical process. Ramanujan’s letter was ten pages long, consisting mostly of technical results  from a wide range of mathematics. He claimed to have a technique for counting prime numbers - numbers greater than 1 that  can only be divided by 1 and by itself.

Prime numbers are notoriously unpredictable. It’s like trying to understand if there's  a pattern that would somehow help you know exactly when your favorite  song will be played on the radio. Although Ramanujan failed to find a  perfect formula for predicting primes, his work provided fresh insights  into their distribution.

He also included theorems  related to integral calculus. Integral calculus can be likened  to slicing a sausage and then reassembling it, making it whole or “integral”. It's a mathematical tool  with real-world applications, like determining the drag on a plane's wing.

As a plane flies, the air hits the wing in  tiny "slices" over time, each contributing to drag. Integral calculus adds up these  small effects to calculate the total drag. Ramanjuan’s letter to Hardy ended this way: “Being poor, if you are convinced that there is  anything of value I would like to have my theorems published.

Being inexperienced I would very  highly value any advice you give me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you. I  remain, Dear Sir, Yours truly, S.

Ramanujan. ” Hardy didn’t know what to make of this unusual  letter from a young man 5,000 miles away. Was this a practical joke?

Or, had he  stumbled upon a second Sir Isaac Newton? Hardy showed the letter to his colleague,  J. E.

Littlewood, who was equally amazed. Some of the formulas were familiar, others Hardy  remarked “seemed scarcely possible to believe…” He concluded that the letter “. .

. was certainly  the most remarkable that I have ever received…” Hardy responded to Ramanujan: “I was exceedingly interested by your letter  and by the theorems which you state. You will however understand that, before I can judge  properly of the value of what you have done, it is essential that I should see  proofs of some of your assertions.

” Such proof was required if others  were to be convinced of the results. Ramanujan didn’t bother explaining  how he arrived at his conclusions; he just lept from insight to insight. Perhaps he took a page out of  the book that so inspired him.

In his response to Hardy’s request to see proof,  Ramanujan mentioned his divergent series result, writing: “If I tell you this you will at once  point out to me the lunatic asylum as my goal. ” Ramanujan wanted someone of stature like Hardy to  recognize the worth in his work so that he could get a scholarship, since, “I am already a half  starving man. To preserve my brains I want food…” Hardy wanted to arrange a scholarship  for him to study at Cambridge.

But crossing the ocean was considered a  serious violation of Ramanujan’s devout orthodox Hindu faith that could  lead to losing his caste status. Hardy’s colleague E. H.

Neville who  was lecturing in Madras had the task of convincing Ramanujan to go to Cambridge. He assured him his strict vegetarian  diet would be respected in England. Any concerns Ramanujan had disappeared  after his mother had a vivid dream in which the Hindu goddess Namagiri instructed  her not to hinder her son's destiny.

On March 17, 1914, Ramanujan set  sail for the journey of his life. He prepared for European life by learning to eat with a knife and fork and  learning how to tie a tie. After a three-day journey, he  arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, to start an  extraordinary collaboration.

He and Hardy couldn’t have  been any more different. Ramanujan was a self-taught savant who believed  equations expressed the thoughts of God. Hardy was a Cambridge professor and an avowed atheist who refused to  believe what he could not prove.

Yet their partnership flourished. Ramanujan and Hardy contributed substantially  to number theory, a branch of mathematics that deals with the fascinating properties and  patterns found within ordinary numbers. One of their most notable works  calculated the 'partitions' of a number.

4 can be partitioned (or  broken down) in five ways. While this may sound straightforward, figuring  out how many ways a number can be partitioned becomes increasingly complex with larger numbers. The number of partitions of 50 is 204,226.

This has practical implications  that aren’t immediately obvious. Partitions can help computers operate  more efficiently; by dividing tasks or data into smaller parts, devices  can process information quicker. Ramanujan pressed on with his work despite being in poor health for much of  his five years in England.

The colder weather didn’t help. He was one found shivering in his Cambridge room, sleeping atop the blankets,  unaware he should be under them. Maintaining a nutritious vegetarian  diet was also difficult in light of the rationing imposed during World War One.

He also skipped meals and ate at random hours of  the day, with no mother or wife to care for him. Ramanujan was eventually diagnosed with  tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency. Being ill and far away from his family  also affected his mental well-being.

In 1918, he threw himself onto the tracks of the London Underground in  front of an approaching train. Luckily, a guard spotted him and pulled a switch, bringing the train to a stop  a few feet before hitting him. His spirits improved considerably later that  year when Britain’s elite body of scientists, the Royal Society, named him a Fellow, the  second Indian at the time to be so honored.

He was elected partly for his  work on elliptic functions, which are used to explain  complex shapes and patterns. Elliptic functions can accurately describe  the movement of planets around the sun, which is neither a perfect  circle nor an exact oval. It’s like having a super-detailed  map of the movement of planets.

Becoming a fellow of the Royal Society is believed to have stimulated the discovery of  some of his most beautiful theorems, which he continued to develop upon returning  to India in 1919…to a hero’s welcome. His life inspired the movie  The Man Who Knew Infinity, reflecting his profound insights  into the nature of infinity. An example is Pi, which starts with 3.

14 and  has an infinite number of decimal places. We can never write down every single digit  of pi, because there's no end to them! Ramanujan got us closer and closer to  this mysterious number in a faster way.

Back home in India, Ramanujan kept  in touch with Professor Hardy, and, in a letter that turned out to be his  last, he hinted at an incredible discovery: Dear Hardy, I am extremely sorry for not writing you  a single letter up to now. I discovered very interesting functions recently  which I call “Mock” ϑ-functions. Mock theta functions are  a highly abstract concept, like a secret code mathematicians  are still trying to understand.

In 2012, mathematician Ken Ono relied  on Ramanujan’s mock theta functions to devise a new math formula to  better understand black holes. This approach helps calculate  the entropy of black holes, a measure of how information gets  scrambled or mixed up inside. Ramanujan's cryptic work still conceals many  mathematical treasures waiting to be discovered.

As Ono put it: “It’s like he was writing down  a bible for us, but it was incomplete. He gave us glimpses of what the future would  be, and our job is to figure it out. ” Ramanujan left behind three notebooks packed with his formulas and loose pages  that were only discovered in 1976.

He was still scribbling away four  days before he died on April 26, 1920. Ramanujan was only 32 years old. Most of his orthodox relatives stayed away  from his funeral because they considered him tainted for having crossed the waters  to England, and he had been too ill to make it to the purification ceremonies  his mother had arranged at the seaside.

When Hardy was invited to receive an honorary  degree at Harvard, he mentioned in his speech that the most significant achievement  of his life was discovering Ramanujan. “I did not invent him — like other great  men, he invented himself - but I was the first really competent person who had the chance  to see some of his work, and I can still remember with satisfaction that I could recognize at  once what a treasure I had found. ” (page 207) “.

. . my association with him is the  one romantic incident in my life.

” We are left to wonder how many Ramanujans are in India or elsewhere today,  waiting to be discovered. This isn’t just a story about  a brilliant mathematician. It’s a story about how educational  institutions can nurture talent and hinder it.

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I’m Cindy Pom.