In 1913, Ramanujan sent nine stale sheets of handwritten theorems to GH Hardy at Trinity College in Cambridge, with a covering letter in quaintly Victorian English. Some of his solutions were trivial, others completely baffling. Later that day, Hardy called over his friend John Littlewood, and they spread the sheets out. “Before midnight they knew, and knew for certain” wrote Hardy’s biographer, CP Snow. “The writer of these manuscripts was a man of genius.”
Part 1 of 2
SUCH was Srinivasa Ramanujan’s passion for numbers that at eleven, two college maths students who lodged with his family in Kumbakonam, near Madras, could no longer satisfy his burning curiosity. At sixteen, he borrowed a book with thousands of problems in Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry and Calculus, and worked out solutions for them all.*
It was Srinivasa’s genius to work his own way, but the price was high. He lost his scholarship at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, in 1904, by scoring just 3% in English. At Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras, he paid such scant attention that he failed his Finals in 1907, disqualifying himself from the University career his natural talent deserved.
In 1911, Ramanujan, whose father was a draper’s clerk, sought something similar in the Madras tax office, but Deputy Collector Ramaswamy Aiyer, a mathematician himself, passed him on to the less hectic Madras Port Trust, knowing that chief accountant Narayana Iyer and Chairman Sir Francis Spring were anxious to foster Ramanujan’s academic career.*
The book was ‘A Synopsis Of Elementary Results In Pure Mathematics (1886)’, by George Shoobridge Carr. Few of the examples had solutions, and it was a characteristic of Ramanujan that he himself rarely provided proofs for his own conjectures.
Edgar Middlemast, Professor of Mathematics at the Presidency College, Madras, wrote a strong letter of recommendation in support of Ramanujan. One of the heartwarming features of Ramanujan’s lifestory was the number of people, Indian and British, who made every effort to help a stranger who had failed most of his exams.
Précis
Srinivasa Ramanujan was a maths prodigy from a village near Madras. In 1907, he disqualified himself from a career in University research by focusing on his own interests to the neglect of the set curriculum, and failing his exams. However, highly-placed British and Indian friends found him time for research while employed as a clerk. (54 / 60 words)
Part Two
The west side of the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge. Ramanujan arrived in England in 1914, at the start of the Great War against the German Empire, and remained at Trinity throughout, working with GH Hardy. “I still say to myself” wrote Hardy in 1941 “when I am depressed and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’”
RAMANUJAN’S well-connected friends secured him a research post at Madras University, and in 1913 encouraged him to contact eminent mathematicians in England.* GH Hardy was so excited by what he saw that he wrote to the India Office immediately about bringing Ramanujan to Cambridge.
Ramanujan, a devoted Hindu, had been brought up to believe foreign travel would be a defilement, but his mother told him the family goddess had appeared and pronounced her blessing. So Ramanujan spent five years collaborating with Hardy, and in 1918 became the first Indian to be elected Fellow of Trinity College. He continued to work as if Mathematics had befriended him, unfolding herself in flashes of insight which he rarely bothered to prove, though nearly all of them were right, and still spark new discoveries today.*
Srinivasa suffered from chronic illness all his life, and in Cambridge his health began to deteriorate seriously. He returned to Madras in 1919, and died in Kumbakonam on April 26th, 1920, aged 32.
Edgar Middlemast helped Ramanujan with his letters, and Gilbert Walker, a mathematician at Trinity College in Cambridge and a friend of Sir Francis Spring, helped him win his place at Madras University.
“Hardy said that this was the most singular experience of his life” wrote CP Snow: “what did modern mathematics look like to someone who had the deepest insight, but who had literally never heard of most of it?”
Précis
In 1913, Ramanujan’s well-placed friends found him a research post as Madras University, and helped him share his ideas with eminent mathematicians in England. One of these, GH Hardy, brought Ramanujan over to Cambridge, where for the next five years Ramanujan enriched Pure Mathematics with a series of brilliant conjectures, until his death in 1919, aged 32. (54 / 60 words)
