Some people attain greatness at a very young age. Some people get recognition after they become old. Some eccentric brilliant minds take ages before their thoughts and postulates get decoded by people four or five generations after them. Only a few people who have walked on this earth, have broken the stereotype of academic education which is equivalent to intelligence. Some special men have left hallmarks of their greatness by being unique and different from other contemporary beings.
In 2001, a movie was made on a great American mathematician and Noble laureate, John Forbes Nash Jr., titled A Beautiful Mind: Meeting John Nash. In 2014, another movie was made on a great British mathematician, Alan Turing, titled Imitation Game. But in 2015, another movie was released — one that should be dearer to us than the aforementioned ones — about a great mathematical genius of all time, titled The Man Who Knew Infinity, made on the life history of our very own Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Great men tend to share similarities if one cares to look closely. Adi Shankara Bhagavatpada, Swami Vivekananda, Subramania Bharathi and Srinivasa Ramanujan lived for a very short period, but the impact they left behind through their work will touch human lives for times to come.
Persistence under penury can be a characteristic of people who strive to attain perfection in their area of profession. Srinivasa Ramanujan should be hailed as a “mathemagician” who was not recognised during his lifetime to be considered in the league of extraordinary gentlemen in the field of Mathematics.
He is considered to be a mathematician par excellence, only to be compared with greats like Euler and Jacobi. For all his informal education, Ramanujan became the second Indian Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, and the first Indian Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in the same year.
Just mere comments about “Simple Properties” and “Simple Outputs” seem to be profound. He individually compiled an astounding 3900 results such as Ramanujan Prime, Ramanujan theta functions and mock theta functions. Most of his postulates or hypothesis are now found correct, almost after a century of his existence. He credited his findings to the divine intervention that didn’t allow him to stop himself from expressing his ideas, even though it didn’t find any takers during those days.
The famous Ramanujan number — 1729 — now fondly known as the “taxicab number” is defined as the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways. It is also known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number because when Ramanujan was sick, GH Hardy, his friend and collaborator, paid him a visit to a clinic near London. Hardy said that he had arrived in taxi number 1729 and described the number “as rather a dull one.” Ramanujan replied to that saying, “No, Hardy, it’s a very interesting number! It’s the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has instituted an award in Ramanujan’s name, which is given annually to an eminent Mathematician who is less than 45 years of age on 31 December of the year of the award and has conducted outstanding research in developing countries. The Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from developing countries has been awarded annually since 2005 and is administered jointly by the ICTP, the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India DST, and the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
He lived as if the only objective of his life was Mathematics. He was selfless and was considered naive sometimes in his relationship with Hardy as he allowed him to walk away with the credit, just because Ramanujan did not put effort to win awards or accolades. His passion for Mathematics was unmatched, and so was his resolve to follow strict vegetarianism, according to his tradition.
It would be an understatement to say that Srinivasa Ramanujan was neither understood by his contemporaries nor by the generations that followed. His pastime, work time, and even his life can be described in one word — Mathematics. Any other normal human being might have lost his mind if he was this obsessed or dedicated to one subject or object, but not Ramanujan. He was an enigma! He credited his prowess to Namagiri Thayar, the Goddess of Namakkal temple. He was unconventional and ensured all the bare minimum for his existence was taken care of through whatever means available to him so that he could continue his focus on Mathematics. When other people would have been scared for their life if they had failed in their regular academic subjects, losing the scholarship they were bestowed, Ramanujan cared little and kept looking for avenues to explore the subject deeper.
Srinivasa Ramanujan should have been an inspiration for many but he was not brought to the limelight for reasons unknown. Today, the world understands his contribution and it goes beyond pure mathematics. It can be applied to devices and information security, the evolution of which started hardly a couple of decades back.
A tribute to Ramanujan would be to accept mathematicians around the world to explore the subject in their ways, regardless of their academic achievements. Public institutions should think beyond regular classroom teachings and provide a platform for those who are truly focused on one subject, regardless of their shortcomings in others. An overhaul of the education system around the world can bring about a change, where present-day ‘Ramanujan’s’ will get their due during their lifetime.
The author is a business analyst with an IT firm. He is also an RJ for Western Music in AIR, Chennai. Views expressed are personal.
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