Alter Ego Blog

September 29th, 2006.

What an evening it was! Room 312, Mathematics Hall in Columbia University was packed to the rafters as almost 200 people made it in for the Ramanujan Panel, A man in pursuit of Infinity. The math department had to arrange for an overflow room with an AV link, the response was overwhelming.

Nilou Safinya, A First Class Man's stage manager, resplendent in a dark blue sari, introduced the evening to the audience. The panelists included Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, spry at the age of 84, with his anecdotes of Cambridge and GH Hardy. Professor Dyson had taken Hardy's classes in number theory while studying at Winchester College. Dyson compared Ramanujan to the great experimental mathematicians of the times, including Euler, Fermat, and Poincaire. Ramanujan's forte laid in the great sweeping theorems that came to him like grand gestures unbidden from a hidden source, a wellspring; unorthodox in its origination. We can call it divine ordination. In Western rationalism, he would be considered a mystic. Ramanujan led mathematics to the mountaintop in pursuit of truth, but left the intricacies of the workings of his theorems to other mathematicians, many who have done yeoman work and earned accolades.

Dyson probably had the most personal insights into the pysche of GH Hardy, a classically trained mathematician true to the book. Perhaps Hardy's greatest characteristic was his unbending rationalism. Dyson called him "a bit of a cold fish." He loved Ramanujan for his mathematics and the intellectual companionship but failed when it came to the more nurturing aspects of the relationship. A tragic note was infused into the life of Ramanujan, when Dyson brought to the fore, the misdiagnosis of Ramanujan's ailment that eventually claimed his life. It was commonly believed that Ramanujan suffered from tuberculosis, in fact, it is now almost certain he had amoebic hepatitis, a condition common in tropical countries, and perfectly treatable. Hardy, in Dyson's eyes was culpable of not seeking out doctor's who were familiar with tropical diseases and confining Ramanujan to a TB sanitarium.

Professors Dorian Goldfeld and Peter Sarnak, number theorists at Columbia and Princeton University, elaborated the Ramanujan partitions, the Ramanujan tau function, and the general Ramanujan conjecture on infinite series. And what is an evening on number theory without the chalkboard? Goldfeld and Sarnak went to work with the chalk scribbling Ramanujan's theorems, with enthusiasm and unbridled glee. For most non-mathematicians in the audience there was an awareness at the end of the evening, what the partition theory in its basic form stood for. As Sarnak stated that Ramanujan loved sums, numbers and their interaction with other numbers. He searched those relationships, pure, and abstract, and strangely in the end, elemental. For Ramanujan was also obsessed with the specifics. Nobody can accuse him of a grand design.

It was left to Gauri Viswanathan, professor of anthropology and comparative literature at Columbia to bring context to Ramanujan's life. She drew attention to the remarkable support that Ramanujan enjoyed in retrospect, in India to carry out his passion, and the ancillary cast of characters, both Indian and British, that were involved in the discovery of Ramanujan. Remarkable given the fact, that India was a British colony, with an educational system that rewarded rote learning. Ramanujan himself was a failure in conventional education, his school performance would have never allowed any success in the clerical jobs open to Indians in those days. That in itself is another fascinating story. She made an interesting point that Hardy's aloofness and pallid nature created a barrier, a space essential for Ramanujan to remain productive, and carry out an astonishing output of work between 1912 to 1914.

There are many contentious points in the annals of colonial history, between India and Britain. In fact, we can debate the whole ' Were the Brits good for us?' and come up with something very unsatisfactory, to both sides. However, in Ramanujan's case, for a brief shining moment in history, contention was laid to rest. In large part by individuals who were willing to work outside of the institutional framework, notably GH Hardy.

The evening was moderated by Harish Bhat, professor of applied mathematics at Columbia, who brought the right touch of wit and gravitas to the proceedings. At the end of an extremely satisfying evening, the panelists and the audience repaired to the Mathematics Lounge for some well deserved beverages and food, courtesy Bilimoria Wines and Devi Restaurant.

We greatly appreciate the help and involvement of Terrance Cope, Administrator at the Mathematics Department, The CU Mathematics Department, the CU Arts Initiative, David Poratta and Anne Burt at the OPA, and the panelists and the audience for making this evening so spectacularly successful.

Below are photos of the Ramanujan evening, courtesy of Asha Divakaran. Thanks also to Andy Brown for filming the panel. We should soon have the video of the panel for those who missed the event and also for those who want to take a look again.

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Tom Stoppard once wrote, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else”, which is a tongue in cheek way of saying that there are opportunities everywhere. I first came across Stoppard in his wondrously zany play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and then by and by got more familiar with his work through my friend and the notorious raconteur Anuvab Pal, a staple of the New York theater scene, rotund in his grubby, coffee stained Thomas Pink shirt and spats. Pal worked ostensibly for Reuters during the day but in the twilight, in dimly lit, urine reeking hallways (he had fallen back on his rent), worked feverishly on his plays, many that Alter Ego produced and none that made money. His father visiting him on those days that Pal habited an apartment was very fond of saying that he would end up like the mad Jesus freak with wild eyes on the 1 train ranting for hours about the world coming to an end. Pal’s father had unsurprisingly chosen not to read any of Pal’s verbiage. Otherwise the similarities would have been fairly clear; both wanted annihilation of the world by different means.

But Alter Ego has made a career of Stoppard’s adage. Legend has is that Puja Ogale and Seema Malik, two Alter Ego members got a blind man to donate his Braille books (a prop essential to a play), after promising him a pair of free tickets to the play. The origin of Alter Ego grew out of a drink fueled conversation between Bhavna Thakur, a transaction lawyer and collector of rare vegetables and Nilay Oza, a toy train addict and an MIT trained architect at a friend’s loft. Bhavna performed a skit of Lady Godiva on horseback that evening, with Nilay clearing the way for her by shoving his host’s dinner table out of the way and rearranging the furniture. Bhavna instantly appreciated his set design skills. The two decided that the next play had to be a horse based one. Fortunately, Peter Schaffer’s Equus lost out to Hayavadana, the talking horse play by Girish Karnad. This was back in 2002. Since then we have been on a tear, averaging one play a year.

Along the way, we have produced Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory, a play about the imperfect physics of love and delusion but mostly delusion; Tom Stoppard’s NY premier of Indian Ink, a play rarely performed by theater companies and thus a treat for all Stoppard fans; Israel Horowitz’s The Indian Wants The Bronx, which featured the smarmy Dell computer kid; Anuvab Pal’s Fatwa, a play about two cranky old men eating lots of kebabs; and a reading of Anuvab Pal and Shourin Roy’s Who’se Afraid of Vijay Tendulkar?, a tribute to India’s foremost playwright, in the presence of the eminence gris himself. I have a feeling that he was not impressed by our efforts because he has never returned our calls or emails.

The NY premier of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, produced by Alter Ego, an Off Off Broadway theater company and not by the Lincoln Center was considered a major coup in NY theater circles. It had Samuel French, Stoppard’s literary agents in a tizzy. In the end it helped that the company comprised of members of the South Asian diaspora who felt that they were equally competent in deciphering a play that was based in their backyard. A point that was driven home by Nilay Oza, Indian Ink’s producer. In the end Nilay’s persistence paid off. It took the personal intervention of Stoppard in giving us the rights to stage the play. He was supposed to have come across the pond for the opening but a bout of food poisoning brought about by the consumption of a plate of chicken tikka masala at a pit stop near Holborn kept him away. He did make it a year later but that was for a NYT sponsored conversation with the late Mel Gussow. We had gone for it but never quite screwed up enough courage to ask him about Indian Ink and what he thought of the itsy bitsy teensy weensy theatre company that had beaten back the Lincoln Center to produce it.

Such was the buzz on the play, that our publicity team thanks to the crystal clear Sprint service on their cell phones had gotten wind that Bob Dylan would be coming for the play. Bob Dylan?? Robert Zimmerman?? Was he considering a career change in Off- Off Broadway productions or Just Blowin’ in the Wind? In the end it turned out to be Matt Dillon, who is a lot easier on the eye than Bob Dylan. No offence to Bob but the last singer who tried his hand at acting was Kris Kristofferson, at present seen on ESPN late night peddling hair products amongst TV ads that promote penis enhancers.

The anecdote serves as a reminder of the pulling power of playwrights such as Tom Stoppard. You just have to mention his name and reviewers and celebrities will fall over themselves to come see the play, of course unless you are from the NYT or the New Yorker. Then it depends on the play and the theater company. In most other instances as revealed in a workshop that I attended thanks to a timely call by Reshma Patel, an unflinching Amitabh Bachhan lover, and together we were supposed to do the Bunty and Babli dance number at Bhavna’s marriage last year, till saner counsels prevailed, is that reviewers consider themselves omnipotent. Their egos need to be regularly massaged and with lesser known playwrights and smaller theater companies, it becomes almost impossible to get a Ben Brantley to review. Thus, let us not berate lawyers too much, the theatre reviewer is equally despicable in many instances. Along the way, Alter Ego has learned that you may get the play, but not necessarily, the review.

This brings us to our forthcoming production, David Freeman’s A First Class Man, a play about the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan and widely considered one of twentieth century’s towering geniuses and his complex relationship with the Cambridge don Professor GH Hardy, his mentor and discoverer, who brought Ramanujan over to Cambridge in the early 1900’s. David Freeman had read Robert Kanigel’s book on Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity, considered the definitive biography by many mathematicians, and it provided the inspiration to dramatize Ramanujan’s life. His early attempts were work shopped by the Lark Theater Company and the play took shape through many iterations.

The story of a simple man with a genius for coming up with mathematical theorems and with little formal training is fascinating because amongst the sciences, mathematics demands the most rigorous proof that is extensively peer reviewed. In contrast, the process in biological sciences is based on empirical evidence. In the face of the overwhelming rationalism seen in mathematics, the stories of Srinivasa Ramanujan and John Nash, Jr, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of game theory and the protagonist of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, stand out starkly. In Ramanujan’s instance each theorem was the result of divine ordination, the family deity, the goddess Namagiri: Schizophrenia in John Nash’s lifelong battle with the disease. The work of Ramanujan and his body of more than 3000 theorems have consumed the likes of Professor Bruce Berndt at the University of Illinois who has spent almost three decades deciphering Ramanujan’s handbooks, the ones that he scrawled his equations on a century ago. Springer Publishing, publishes the Ramanujan Journal, the foremost journal on number theory that has 25 editors on the board, representing universities from the USA to Japan. The SASTRA institute in Thanjavur recently instituted the SASTRA prize, in remembrance of Ramanujan. The prize is given to mathematicians under the age of 32 years (the age at which Ramanjuan passed away) for their outstanding contribution in number theory. Manjul Bhargava and Kannan Sounderrajan were the first recepients of the prize at a function held in Ramanujan's hometown of Kumbakonam.

For mathematicians everywhere, deciphering Ramanujan’s compendium of theorems has proved to be immensely challenging and rewarding. But what is there for the non-mathematicians? Well, the equally important task to take Ramanujan out of the ivory tower. We forget that Ramanujan was not just a mathematician, although he happens to be one of the few definitive ones, in the lines of Euler, Fermat, and Poincaire, he was also a human being of flesh and blood. Mathematics proved to be a giant source of sublimation for this apparently simple man making choices that he did not have control of; his education, work, and marriage. His unhappiness in having these choices made for him, drove him from India, much against his religious beliefs to find validity in his passion, mathematics: To Cambridge and GH Hardy, bearing miserably cold winters, starvation, and a society that understood very little of him, to sickness and finally, death. In his short span of 32 years, he lived in those days, a remarkable life. A life that apart from a few of us, know very little of, because so far we have books. And who reads those? But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A First Class Man, spearheads a line of future productions that are coming out on Ramanujan. Next year, Stephen Fry, a fellow Cambridge alumni and Dev Benegal are bringing out a movie on Ramanujan, followed by Warner Brothers and their picture on his life based on Robert Kanigel's book. If rumors are to be believed, Johnny Depp is playing Ramanujan. I think it probably would have brought a little smile to Ramanujan’s face, to think that the hero of the Pirates of the Caribbean would be playing him.

As for Alter Ego, as we said before, we have found opportunites at every exit. Especially at exit 6 of the NJ Turnpike, where Amit Nerurkar found a discarded toy horse head that served as the main prop in Hayavadana, our first play. We have moved along and are now looking for a serving dish that holds meat, the fancy ones with a retractable cover. We still have about 12 more exits to go. Knowing Alter Ego, we will find it.

Posted by Shourin Roy at 05:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ALTEREGO productions invites you to the world premiere of

A First Class Man

One man in pursuit of infinity. The astonishing true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the renowned mathematical prodigy whose ideas changed the world as we know it.

Written by DAVID FREEMAN + directed by KAREEM FAHMY*

Starring:

Bobby Abid, Chriselle Almeida*, Amir Arison*, Kelly Eubanks, Steve French*, Davis Hall*, Timothy Roselle*, Doug Simpson, Vikram Somaya, Radhika Vaz

Production:

Stage Manager: Nilou Safinya, Sets: Jeffery Eisenmann, Costumes: Chloe Chapin, Sound & Music: Andrew Papadeas , Lights: Bryan Keller

At

The 45th Street Theater (354 W. 45th St)

Performances: October 5th to 21st:
Wednesday through Saturday at 8 pm (except Fri Oct 6 at 7 pm)
Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 pm

To purchase the $18/- Tickets:
www.smarttix.com ; (212) 868-4444.

For Oct 6th Opening Night Tickets, please contact:

Priyanka Lilaramani: priyanka@stern.nyu.edu ; 917 715 3287

For Press inquiries, please contact:

Shourin Roy: sr240@columbia.edu; 646 662 6057

*Past Press: *

*Theater Mania* - "The professionalism, wit and daring on abundant display . . . . make AlterEgo Productions a company to look out for"

*TheaterMania* - listed Indian Ink under best of 2003 as a "Shows You Should Have Seen But Probably Didn't"

www.alteregoproductions.org

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George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The father of solipsism, George Santayana, was never more correct when he said this. However, taken literally only amnesiacs would get in trouble. The vast majority of us through the ages have wilfully tried to disregard or manipulate this adage to rewrite history. From Nero to present day George W Bush. Of course, GWB was invoking Santayana when he made the equivalence of the UN's (read Hans Blix) so called prevarication dealing with Saddam, to the time that Neville Chamberlain, appeased Hitler and the Nazis on their war designs, which of course led to World War II. But if GWB was a more astute student of history he would have also read the historical tracts that said that the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, were ungovernable by any colonial power, including the British. A tract written by none other than Sir Richard Burton, a soldier historian, who lived for decades in the Middle East, unlike GWB and his group of neocons.

So here is Stephen Fry on Why History Matters: A moving and very poignant reminder.

Why does history matter? A better man might be able to answer with far more questions than answers. Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were? While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum. History is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. History is written by the victor. Historians are prophets looking backwards. Or we could paraphrase EM Forster on the novel. 'Does history tell a story? Oh, dear me yes, history tells a story.'
Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history. After all, is there such a thing as history or are there only histories? For all the oddities of some arcane scientific research, we all know that science eventually leads to making light bulbs work, car engines run and failed hearts pump again. Can we test the value of history in the same way? Can we prove that a politician, a financier or a spot-welder is better, happier or more fulfilled for possessing a feel for history?

But ... isn't history now just point of view, tribal assertion, cultural propaganda? After all, the days of Burke, Macaulay, Gibbon, Trevelyan and Froude are over. Historians are no longer grandees at the centre of a fixed civilisation; they are simply journalists writing about celebrities who haven't got the grace to be alive any more. Certainly, some people sense in our world, even if they can't prove it, a new and bewildering contempt for the past. In the high street of life, as it were, no one seems to look above the shop-line. Today's plastic signage at street level is the focus; yesterday's pilasters, corbels and pediments above are neither noticed nor considered, save by what some would call cranks and conservationists.

There are those who wonder if the whole of history is now valuable only as a politically correct lesson in the stupidity and cruelty of monarchs, aristocrats, industrialists and generals. Stern, loveless voices tell us that history as we know it is an irrelevance, with its obsession with dead white men, or with Judaeo-Christianity, or classical antiquity, or the West, or enlightenment, or wars, dynasties and treaties. Marxists, Althusserians, formalists, revisionists, historians of Empire or against Empire - forget them all. You don't even have to dignify it with ideological abstractions any more; history is really the story of a series of subjugations, oppressions, exploitations and abuses.

Or history is heritage studies: cotton mills, marshalling yards and collieries smartened up as 'resources' for school trips; take the kids into the kitchens and servants' quarters of the stately home and ignore the saloons and great rooms above stairs for fear of giving offence. British culture, besieged on all sides by guilt: guilt at empire, guilt at English domination of the United Kingdom, guilt at slavery, at industrial wage-slavery, at Boer Wars, Afghan Wars, mutinies, massacres and maladministrations.

History, then, as one long, grovelling apology or act of self-abasement and self-laceration. A history in which historians have to stand on one side of an argument or another, for, in between, they are nothing but dry-as-dust statisticians. Or we see historians as creepy hindsight critics who can, in the safety of their studies, point out to Alexander the Great and Napoleon where they went wrong and how they would have done it better.

And yet, against this, we measure the exponential growth in the public appetite for history. Has it ever been a better time to be a historian? In publishing and in broadcasting, history is a phenomenon that continues to exceed expectations. Enthusiasts bounding about from battlefield to palace and castle and back again, filling more air time then ever before. From Melvyn Bragg's matchless colloquies on Radio 4 to documentary series bearing the proud epithets 'landmark', 'flagship', 'prestige' 'must-see', 'event TV' and 'water-cooler moments'. Just recently, we've had themed evenings on BBC 4 on the 18th century as well as documentaries and big news items on the Somme. Certainly, history is popular in grand traditional forms, but new subgenres of history have, for the last 20 years, exploded in popularity, too. The history of science, philosophy and thought: sidelights are more popular than floodlights - small histories of the cod, tulips, salt, sugar or the pepper gardens of India, little books with names like 'Darwin's Walking Stick', Newton's Trousers' or 'Brahi's Nose'; whole genres on voyages of discovery, at least 10 books on Joseph Banks of the Endeavour and Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, books on the transit of Venus and longitude and Sumerian counting systems all seem to be flying off the shelves.

Family history has exploded in popularity, too. I was involved in the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? programme and received more mail and feedback from that one programme than from anything else I've ever done. 'I never knew what the Holocaust meant until I saw your programme,' one viewer wrote to me. We might find this a little odd, but it tells us that many people cannot see links between facts and historical narratives, unless those facts are brought absolutely to life, mediated by personality. Is that cheap celebrity culture at work or is it the perfectly human truth that while the slaughter of a nameless six million is hard to fathom, the murder of a named and delineated family can move us inexpressibly?

After all, isn't that what poetry and novels show, that humanity is best comprehended by understanding humans rather than ideas? But for some, this leads to the worry that history can now only mean witness. And some of us fear that even the most respectable documentary programme now cannot get through two minutes of screen time without some preposterous reconstruction involving wigs, candles, actors, ponderous music, scratching quills and even more wigs, so afraid is television of telling without showing.

Might this lead us to suspect that the history phenomenon is akin to that of television cuisine? More and more of us watch cooking, yet fewer and fewer ever wield a skillet in anger. Such a suspicion doesn't really make sense. You can cook, but you can't history, can you? You can carry what you learn of history inside you, at least. You can connect. And that's the point. We can never measure how much history has penetrated the consciousness of the nation.

We all know the cliches; the middle-class man reads biography and history, especially military history; the wife carries on reading novels, because men 'get' abstraction, numbers and grand strategy and women 'get' relationships. Men do seem to like history; history becomes their bedtime reading, their sitting-down version of golf, dare one say?

For men, history can seem to be a kind of Higher Sport (no coincidence perhaps that we still talk of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton and still describe the little 19th-century dance between Russia and imperial Britain over India as the Great Game. Napoleon should have played with two up front; we didn't win the war, but we saved the follow-on). At the dinner table, the wives break up the boy-girl, boy-girl placement and gather down at one end to talk about friendships and books, while the men stay up the other end to discourse on von Paulus's surrender or Clive at the Battle of Plassey. Very NW3, very dinner party, but, in the meantime, what about the young? Is history like Radio 4, something you only turn to when you are middle-aged and middle-class? Are the young too busy living to look back?

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.

No, it isn't exactly political correctness that dogs history; it's more a pernicious refusal to enter imaginatively the lives of our ancestors. Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?

We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are. This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.

In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts. If you cannot imagine yourself wanting to riot against Catholic emancipation, say, or becoming an early Tory and signing up to fight with the Old Pretender, or cheering on Prynne as the theatres are closed and Puritanism holds sway ... knowing is not enough. If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: 'Wilkes and Liberty!' or, indeed, cried: 'Death to Wilkes!', if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

The bizarre but wonderful William Gerhardi wrote a polemical introduction to his book, The Romanovs, a foreword he called a 'Historian's Credo', a series of furious and marvellously eccentric aphorisms. One paragraph reads: 'History must at last convince of the uselessness of insensate mass movements riding roughshod, now as ever, over anonymous suffering and claiming priority in the name of some newly clothed abstraction. If it does not teach that, it does not teach anything.'

It was appropriate to write that as he did in 1939, and it is appropriate for us all to remember it today.

Stephen Fry and Dev Benegal are in the midst of producing and directing About Ramanujan, a feature film about the Indian mathematical genius.

Posted by Shourin Roy at 02:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NUMB3RS is a drama about an FBI agent who recruits his mathematical-genius brother to help the Bureau solve a wide range of challenging crimes in Los Angeles. The two brothers take on the most confounding criminal cases from a very distinctive perspective. Inspired by actual cases, the series depicts how the confluence of police work and mathematics provides unexpected revelations and answers to the most perplexing criminal questions. A dedicated FBI agent, Don Eppes (Rob Morrow), couldn't be more different from his younger brother, Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz), a brilliant mathematician who, since he was little, yearned to impress his big brother. As a seasoned investigator, Don deals in hard facts and evidence, whereas Charlie, a math professor at a California university, functions in a world of mathematical probability and equations. Now, despite their disparate approaches to life, Don and Charlie are able to combine their areas of expertise and solve some killer cases.

Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan

Of interest is that Navi Rawat who acted in Houses of Sand and Fog (starring Ben Kingsley) and as Theresa in The OC, plays the character of 'Amita Ramanujan', a reference to our hero Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The CBS TV show NUMB3RS, airs on Fridays, at 10:00 PM EST/PT

It seems like an interesting show and looking at Navi, I have suddenly gotten infinitely interested in partition numbers. She does have quite a 'number' theory on her.

Posted by Shourin Roy at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After seeing the tip of the iceberg on Ramanujan, here are the thoughts that I have:

The story of Ramanujan is a fascinating tale of extra-ordinary happenstance, a mathematical genius, with so many what ifs, what if GH Hardy and J Littlewood had dismissed him as a quack, what if Ramanujan's mother had not had those vivid dreams of her son in Europe, what if Ramanujan had succeeded in committing suicide, what if Ramanujan's illness had been correctly diagnosed, what if GN Watson had not kept those papers in a box, what if after his death those papers had been burned, what if George Andrews had not stumbled upon those papers after 50 years, and understood their import, what if Bruce Berndt had not been inspired by spending the next thirty years pouring over those theorems, what if Richard Askey had not responded to Janaki Ammal's plea for recognition of her late husband, what if........ what if...... it is an infinite series of what ifs.

What if Ramanujan had been born in England with the mathematical abilities he had. He would have been hailed for his work but his life would have been an unremarkable life of finite what ifs. Even the famous taxi cab number incident could not have occurred.

Posted by Shourin Roy at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Van Vleck Hall, Mathematics, University of Wisconsin-M

There are individual contributors whose invaluable work has gone a long way in understanding Ramanujan but it would not be amiss to say that Van Vleck Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is probably in the US, where the pioneering work on Ramanujan's work, and that of his life, began. These were largely the efforts of Prof Richard Askey (PhD, Princeton, 1961) who joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1963, retiring in 2003 as Professor Emeritus; Prof Bruce Berndt (PhD, UW, 1966), who is now the Michio Suzuki Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois Champaign; and Prof George E Andrews (PhD, U Penn, 1964), the Evan Pugh professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Prof Askey recounts those days in the 1970's.

" In the 1970s the University of Wisconsin played a role in the Ramanujan story. Professor George Andrews of Penn State University was brought to Madison for the academic year 1975-76. While Andrews and I worked in different areas, there was a field in the intersection of our interests which was starting to have applications to algebraic coding theory. Both of us wanted to learn what the other knew, so Andrews and I ran a joint seminar two days a week.

That spring Andrews went off to France for a meeting. Since he was not teaching that summer, he had time to extend his stay; and after spending a week in Strasbourg and Paris, he went to Cambridge to see what old manuscripts he could find.

One discovery was a box labeled "G.N. Watson" which contained 120 loose sheets in Ramanujan's handwriting. Andrews was uniquely well qualified to find these sheets; I doubt if anyone else would have recognized that about 5 percent of the work dealt with mock theta functions, the functions which Ramanujan had discovered after returning to India. What Andrews had come upon was the only record that has ever been found concerning what Ramanujan did in India in the fifteen months between the time he left England and his death. Ramanujan's widow said that he continued to work until four days before he died.

These sheets contain gems more valuable than anyone suspected, as well as just ordinary, good work. Very little of the mathematics on these sheets had been rediscovered by others during the more than fifty-five years from Ramanujan's death to the discovery by Andrews.

How did these sheets get into a box labeled "G.N. Watson" in the Wren Library at Trinity College? Around 1930, G.N. Watson had given his presidential address to the London Mathematical Society. It dealt with mock theta functions. He had spent up to two years working on these functions, and he had been able to prove some of the claims made by Ramanujan. After Watson's death, J.M. Whittaker was asked to write an obituary of Watson for the Royal Society. He contacted Watson's widow and asked if he could examine Watson's papers. He was invited to Watson's home, and after lunch her son took him to the study. Here is what he tells us about the papers he found there:

They covered the floor of a fair sized room to a depth of about a foot, all jumbled together, and were to be incinerated in a few days. One could only make lucky dips and, as Watson never threw away anything, the result might be a sheet of mathematics but more probably a receipted bill or a draft of his income tax return for 1923. By an extraordinary stroke of luck one of my dips brought up the Ramanujan material which Hardy must have passed on to him when he [Watson] proposed to edit the earlier notebooks (Berndt and Rankin).

It was decided that it would be best to store this material at Trinity, where both Ramanujan and Watson had been fellows."

George Andrews is now working on a multi volume study of Ramanujan's 'lost notebook' with Bruce Berndt, with the first volume out in June 2005. Richard Askey with S Chandrasekhar were responsible for commissioning the busts on S Ramanujan.

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Freeman Dyson, the famous theoritical physicist, who discussed everything under the sun, on those evening strolls on the grounds of Princeton with Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel, while at the Institute for Advanced Studies, retained his interest in number theory and Ramanujan. Dyson graduated from Winchester College, Cambridge with a BA in mathematics in 1945, and then went to Cornell in 1947 for his postgraduate studies, working with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His biggest contribution was the unification of three models of quantum thermodynamics proposed by Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Sin- ItiroTomonaga, who went on to win the Nobel in Physics in 1965, for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles. Hans Bethe won the Physics Nobel in 1967 for his work on nuclear reactions.

Dyson subsequently worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

This is his prescription for those suffering from the blues, malaise, and headaches:

Freeman Dyson, another retired professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, was a third-year high school student at Winchester in England when he won a school mathematics award and chose Ramanujan's Collected Papers as his prize. By the time Dyson entered Trinity College, he was able to conjecture a combinatorial reason for the divisibility by 5 of the number of partitions of 5n+4 (see sidebar). Throughout Dyson's distinguished career as a physicist, he has retained his interest in mathematics and in Ramanujan. Dyson once wrote that whenever he is angry or depressed, he pulls down the Collected Papers from the shelf and takes a quiet stroll in Ramanujan's garden. He recommends this not only as good therapy for headaches, but because of the beautiful ideas which may lead one to more interesting mathematics.

Freeman Dyson is now retired, lives in Princeton, and is a favorite on the lecture circuit. Dyson is one of the world's leading advocates for nuclear disarmament* and a peace activist. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2000.
He has written many books including, "Imagined Worlds," published by Harvard University Press, 1997 and "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet," published by Oxford University Press, 1999.

* Most of the leading nuclear physicists, such as Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Freeman Dyson, became strong anti-nuclear weapon advocates during the time of the Cold War The exception being Edward Teller, the H bomb pioneer, whose controversial testimony against Robert Oppenheimer in 1954, assumed political significance, and whose subsequent strong advocacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 80's, probably did more to seal the myth that Ronald Reagan was the architect of Communism's fall. The current perception that Republicans are much better at national security began then, and now with their preventive policies, a reversal of the containment policy advocated by Democrats George Kennan and Dean Acheson in the '40s and '50s. Meanwhile the SDI has wasted billions of dollars producing virtually nothing in the process.

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S Chandrasekhar, Prof Richard Askey (UW-M), Prof George Andrews (PSU)

Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars. He is best known for his celebrated discovery of the Chandrasekhar Limit. He showed that there is a maximum mass which can be supported against gravity by pressure made up of electrons and atomic nuclei. The value of this limit is about 1.44 times a solar mass. This was derived by Chandrasekhar in 1930, when he was a student. The Chandrasekhar Limit plays a crucial role in understanding stellar evolution. If the mass of a tar exceeded this limit, the star would not become a white dwarf. It would continue to collapse under the extreme pressure of gravitational forces. The formulation of the Chandrasekhar Limit led to the discovery of neutron stars and black holes.

However, S Chandrasekhar, was also known for his philanthropic gesture towards keeping Ramanujan's mathematical legacy alive, played an instrumental role in establishing the Ramanujan Institute of Mathematics at Madras University in the late 1940s and when the Institute was facing financial crisis he took up the matter with Nehru. He also managed to get an increased pension for Ramanujan's widow who was living in abject poverty.
In an appreciation of Ramanujan, S. Chandrasekhar wrote:

It is hopeless to try to emulate him.
But he was there, even as the Everest is there.

S Chandrasekhar along with Profs Richard Askey, George Andrews, and Bruce Bendt at the Univ of Wisconsin, Madison were responsible for commissioning the 11 busts of Ramanujan from the only authentic photo of his, his passport. Here is the story of how it all came to be:

Ramanujan's bust sculpted by Paul Granlund (Photo: Bill Fritsch)

Janakiammal was receiving a pension from the University of Madras since 1920, the year of her husband’s death. This amount was then only Rs.20 per month and it gradually rose to about Rs. 500 per month, at the time of her passing away. In interviews which appeared in newspapers, soon after the “Lost” Note Book of Ramanujan was discovered by George Andrews in 1976, Janakiammal lamented the fact that a statue of Ramanujan had never
been made, although one had been promised. Prof. Richard Askey saw these newspaper interviews and decided that a bust of Ramanujan was long overdue since Ramanujan’s widow wanted one and that In Ramanujan’s case a permanent memorial is appropriate: one which can be appreciated by those who do not understand his mathematics should be added to the memorial Ramanujan made for himself with his work. So, garnering the support of a hundred mathematicians, including Profs. George Andrews, Bruce Berndt and S. Chandrsekhar, Prof. Askey commissioned a bronze bust, from the only authentic passport size photograph of Ramanujan, by Paul Granlund, sculptor-in-residence at Gustavus Adolphus College at Saint Peter, Minnesota in U.S.A. A copy of the bust was presented to Mrs.Ramanujan in 1985 at a formal function in the University of Madras.

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Professor Bruce C. Berndt is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, specializing in number theory, in the areas that Srinivasa Ramanujan influenced. He is the editor of Ramanujan's Notebooks, a series of five handbooks (Springer Verlag, 1985- 1998) and has spent almost 30 years proving Ramanujan's theorems. He has written more than a 100 papers on Ramanujan's theorems. Prof Berndt is also the co-ordinating editor of The Ramanujan Journal He along with fellow number theorists, Prof Richard Askey (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Prof George Andrews (Penn State University), are considered be the foremost scholars not only on Ramanujan's work but on his life too.

Prof Berndt recounts how he started his journey into proving Ramanujan's theorems.

While residing for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, on a cold winter day in early February, 1974, I was reading two papers by Emil Grosswald [34], [35] in which some formulas from the notebooks were proved. I observed that I could prove these formulas by using a theorem I had proved two years earlier on
the modular transformations of a large class of functions including the Dedekind eta{function. I was naturally curious to determine if there were other formulas in the notebooks which I could prove employing my methods. Fortunately, the library at Princeton University has a copy of the Tata Institute's edition, and, indeed, I found a few more formulas of the same sort which I could prove. Eventually I wrote two long papers [7], [8] providing proofs of several formulas from the notebooks and many others of a kindred nature.

All of the aforementioned formulas of Ramanujan can be found in Chapter 14 of his second notebook. However, there were many beautiful formulas involving infinite series in Chapter 14 that I could not prove. So, after the spring semester at the University of Illinois ended in May, 1977, I decided to attempt to find proofs for all 87 formulas in Chapter 14. After working on this project for close to a year, George Andrews, in a visit at the University of Illinois, informed me that Watson and Wilson's efforts in editing the notebooks were preserved in Trinity College Library at Cambridge. The librarian kindly sent me a copy of their notes, which have been enormously helpful. Especially helpful have been Watson's notes on the chapters on modular equations. Thus, since May, 1977, I have devoted all of my research efforts to editing Ramanujan's notebooks. This work, accomplished with the help of several mathematicians, is contained in [9], [10], [11], [12], and [13].

Prof Bruce Berndt introduces us to the areas that Ramanujan influenced.

Although Ramanujan is primarily known to the mathematical community as a number theorist, only a small portion of the material in the notebooks is devoted to
number theory. Most of the contents come under the purview of classical analysis. However, numerous results, e.g., the several hundred theorems on theta functions and modular equations, are at the interface of analysis and number theory. Opening the notebooks, one will likely focus on some innite series. Infinite series were
undoubtedly Ramanujan's first love; perhaps only Euler possessed Ramanujan's talents in working with infinite series.

Prof Berndt's writing is invaluable for those who want to know more about Ramanujan and his work. He gives us an idea of the areas that Ramanujan influenced.

1. Elementary Mathematics
2. Number Theory
3. Infinite Series
4. Integrals
5. Asymptotic Expansions and Approximations
6. The Gamma Function and Related Functions
7. Hypergeometric Functions
8. q{Series
9. Continued Fractions
10. Theta Functions and Modular Equations

For those keen mathematicians who want a fuller description of the theorems and their proofs, please consult Dr Berndt's Notebooks:

9. B. C. Berndt, Ramanujan's Notebooks, Part I, Springer{Verlag, New York, 1985.
10. B. C. Berndt, Ramanujan's Notebooks, Part II, Springer{Verlag, New York, 1989.
11. B. C. Berndt, Ramanujan's Notebooks, Part III, Springer{Verlag, New York, 1991.
12. B. C. Berndt, Ramanujan's Notebooks, Part IV, Springer{Verlag, New York, 1994.
13. B. C. Berndt, Ramanujan's Notebooks, Part V, Springer{Verlag, New York, 1998.

For the complete overview on Ramanujan

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This article has been posted up on behalf of Deepanjana Pal

"I've always been fascinated by the Ramanujan story, hasn't everyone?" asks Benegal. Probably not. For a country credited with discovering zero (I mean the number, not the concept), our interest in mathematical geniuses isn't necessarily overwhelming. As was obvious when an interviewer was more eager to know whether Stephen Fry's "discovery" of his own homosexuality was the reason to work on a screenplay about Ramanujan (Fry blinked uncomprehendingly for a moment and then politely said that he didn't see the relevance). It would perhaps been more pertinent to ask about Fry's years at Cambridge, which was when he first came across Ramanujan. He had been thinking about writing the story of 'the man who knew infinity' since then but had held back because he hadn't
found the right Indian to co-script and co-produce the project. Along came Dev Benegal.

Benegal, Fry and Gina Carter (of Sprouts Production) were in India to talk about the film, which begins shooting next year. Benegal said he was hoping to meet the Prime Minister (a Cambridge alumnus) and the President (who was born near Erode where Ramanujan was born) with Fry. I'm not sure how they can help with Ramanujan's story but Benegal looked immensely happy at the prospect of meeting them and contactmusic would have us believe that President Kalam is "working with" Fry.

Srinivas Aiyangar Ramanujan: a college drop-out, a mathematical genius, a homosexual, an Indian and dead by the age of 33. This could almost be more interesting than Jack the Ripper, especially with Stephen Fry doing the
writing. The multi-million dollar film will be directed by Dev Benegal and will be jointly-produced by Tropic Films and Sprouts' Productions. It will be filmed in Erode, Kumbakonam (Tamil Nadu) and Cambridge. No actors have been cast yet but Benegal promises us that it's not going to be the likes of Shah Rukh Khan or Aamir Khan. The focus will be on the relationship between Srinivas Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy, who would many years later describe Ramanujan as the only romance of his life. Now who thought anyone would say that about an Indian man from Kumbakonam whose idea of a love letter possibly involved partition numbers?

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Ken Ono is the Solle P. and Margaret Manasse Professor of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
His email address is ono@math.wisc.edu.

JUNE/JULY 2006 NOTICES OF THE AMS 641

In December, 2005 number theorist Ken Ono undertook a trip to India to the land of Srinivasa Ramanujan, ostensibly to attend the SASTRA University's conference on Number Theory and Computational Physics, where he was to give his lecture on Mock Theta Functions and Maass numbers and hear his student Karl Mahlburg give his first plenary lecture. Another highlight was to attend the SASTRA Ramanujan award for young mathematicians working in research influenced by Ramanujan's contribution to number theory, being awarded to his friends and fellow number theorists, Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University) and Kannan Sounderrajan (University of Michigan). His deeper and a more personal purpose was to understand better the legend that was Ramanujan. It was a pilgrimage to the home of an enigmatic genius whose work in number theory is still being deciphered even sixty years after his death and which has fascinated Ken Ono ever since he embarked on his career as a mathematician.

Ken Ono is a good friend of Bruce Berndt, the number theorist at the University of Illinois (Urbana- Champaign), who has spent three decades studying Ramanujan's theorems from his notebooks. One of Ken Ono's collaboration with Bruce Berndt, was deciphering Ramanujan's work on partition numbers.

Here is Ken Ono reminiscing about that momentous visit and his own interest in Srinivasa Ramanujan. His father is an eminent number theorist, Takashi Ono, at Johns Hopkins. At that time Ken Ono was a teenager more interested in bike racing. He recounts his first experience with Ramanujan.

I first heard the story of Ramanujan when I was a reticent teenager obsessed with bicycle racing. It was a beautiful spring day in 1984, and my mind was on an important bicycle race in Washington D.C. when a letter adorned with Indian stamps arrived. The letter was dated 17-3-1984, and it was carefully typewritten on delicate rice paper. My father, Takashi Ono, a number theorist at Johns Hopkins University, was deeply moved by the letter which read:

Dear Sir,
I understand from Mr. Richard Askey,
Wisconsin, U.S.A., that you have contributed
for the sculpture in memory of
my late husband Mr. Srinivasa Ramanujan.
I am happy over this event.
I thank you very much for your good
gesture and wish you success in all your
endeavours.
Yours faithfully,
Signed S. Janaki Ammal

My father explained that Dick Askey, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had organized an effort, on behalf of the mathematicians of the world, to commission a sculpture of Ramanujan. This initiative was in response to an interview4 with Janaki Ammal, Ramanujan’s widow. She lamented, They said years ago a statue would be erected in honor of my husband. Where is the statue?

Financed by Askey’s efforts, artist Paul Granlund rendered a sculpture based on Ramanujan’s 1919 passport photo, and he produced eleven bronze casts, including one for Ramanujan’s widow. My father happily contributed US$25, and hence the letter. Upon hearing this explanation, I asked, “Who was Ramanujan?” “Why would you give $25 expecting nothing in return?” That was when I first heard Ramanujan’s story.

It was a singular moment in the young Ken Ono's life at a time when he was not really interested in pursuing a career in mathematics.

" As it was, the romantic tale made a lasting impression, and, thanks to my choice of career and the passage of time, has become one of my favorite stories."

Twenty years later, after that first encounter with Ramanujann, Ken Ono was on a plane to India reading GH Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, wrestling with Hardy's words in the Tercentenary lecture at Harvard that he delivered in 1936.

"I am sure that Ramanujan was no mystic and that religion, except in a strictly material sense, played no important
part in his life. Could this be true? He also proclaimed (see page 5 of [17]), There is quite enough about Ramanujan
that is difficult to understand, and we have no need to go out of our way to manufacture mystery."

Is it possible to rationally explain the legend of Ramanujan?

I arrived in Chennai at 8:45 a.m. on December 19, 2005 from Mumbai.

Imagine Ken Ono's delight that the work that he did was mentioned at the Sarangapani Temple at Kumbakonam where Ramanujan and his family visited daily for their prayers. The temple has numbers scrawled on the walls.

" I excitedly searched for 1729, the taxi cab number. I never spotted it, but to my amazement I found 2719 prominently etched at eye level. For me this number plays a special role in the lore of Ramanujan, not only as a permutation of the digits of 1729, but for its connection to his work on quadratic forms. In 1997 Sound and I proved [21], assuming the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, that 2719 is the largest odd number not represented by Ramanujan’s ternary quadratic form

x2 + y2 + 10z2.

I was delighted to see it near where Ramanujan worked a century ago."

In the end did Ken Ono's pilgrimage help him to understand the legend of Ramanujan? Not really, but his explanation would have gladdened the hearts of many authors of magical realism, from Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, to Yann Martel, and their followers, of the infinite powers of the imagination and the mysteries of the human heart.

" For me, there is a poetic resolution to the question of whether one can rationally explain the legend of Ramanujan: this true story is one of magic. Ramanujan was an untrained mathematician, toiling largely in isolation, whose work was born entirely out of imagination. He was a pioneer and a self-taught anticipator of great mathematics, and
this is indeed magical. After all, great mathematics is magic, something we can understand but whose inspiration we cannot comprehend. Ramanujan was a gift to the world of mathematics."

In similar fashion that so many in the theater world undertake the journey to Stratford Upon Avon to pay homage to the Bard of Avon, this is Ken Ono's moving and touching account of his journey to Ramanujan's home in Kumbakonam.>>

(Ken Ono, Honoring a Gift from Kumbakonam, Notices Of The AMS, Volume 53, Number 6, June/ July 2006)

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One of the exciting events that we are planning ahead in the near future, in September, is a panel of experts discussing Srinivasa Ramanujan's life and work. Together they will try and deconstruct the enigmatic genius that is Ramanujan. We want to invite all mathematicians, number theorists, students, journos, historians, theater and lay people, to participate in this discussion. Right now we are in the midst of assembling a panel. a moderator, and a suitable venue for this event. The event will also include a reading of excerpted portions of our play on Ramanujan, "A First Class Man," a Q & A session, as well as a mixer with wine and cheese. It promises to be a very fulfilling evening.

All suggestions, comments, questions, and ways you can be part of this event are welcome. Feel free to contact us at www.alteregoproductions.org/blog and send in your comments and/ or contact Puja Ogale at puja@alteregoproductions.org or call her at 917-488-4189.

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The Power of Partitions
Writing a whole number as the sum of smaller numbers springs a mathematical surprise

Ivars Peterson

Just a year before his death in 1920 at the age of 32, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan came upon a remarkable pattern in a special list of whole numbers.

The list represented counts of how many ways a given whole number can be expressed as a sum of positive integers. For example, 4 can be written as 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. Including 4 itself but excluding different arrangements of the same integers (2 + 1 + 1 is considered the same as 1 + 2 + 1), there are five distinct possibilities, or so-called partitions, of the number 4. Similarly, the integer 5 has seven partitions.

The list that Ramanujan perused gave for each of the first 200 integers, the number of their partitions, which range from 1 to 3,972,999,029,388.

Ramanujan noticed that, starting with 4, the number of partitions for every fifth integer is a multiple of 5. For instance, the number of partitions for 9 is 30 and for 14 is 135.

He discovered several more such patterns. Starting with 5, the number of partitions for every seventh integer is a multiple of 7, and starting with 6, the number of partitions for every 11th integer is a multiple of 11. Moreover, similar relationships occur where the interval between the chosen integers is a power of 5, 7, or 11 or a product of these powers. Ramanujan went on to prove rigorously that these patterns hold not only for the 200 partition numbers in his table but also for all higher numbers.

It was a curious discovery. Nothing in the definition of partitions hinted that such relationships, called congruences, should exist or that the prime numbers 5, 7, and 11 should play a special role.

After many decades of nearly fruitless searching that yielded just one or two apparently isolated examples of large numbers that fit the pattern, mathematicians came to believe that no other congruences exist. Those found by Ramanujan and the later mathematicians were thought to be little more than numerical flukes.

Read more >>

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A lot of us know about Srinivasa Ramanujan's discovery by GH Hardy and to Hardy should go the lion's share of credit for discovering Ramanujan's genius and making him the icon that he is in the field of number theory today.

However much of this would have been impossible if it had not been for a cast of characters in Ramanujan's life who were convinced that this boy was a precocious talent, who failed his college examination at the Governmant College in Kumabkonam because he loved mathematics and cared nothing for physiology and English. He ultimately transfered to Pacchaiyappa's College, where he failed yet again. (My uncle went to Pacchaiyappa's College, and it was a college that accepted all the academic dregs in Madras. We can afford to laugh now because my uncle has done quite well, but there was a time when my mother's family had months of sleepless nights). Ramanujan did not do much from 1907 to 1910 other than record his theorems, without really working until he met VR Aiyar.

So in short, the cast of characters:

VR Aiyar, the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society was a deputy collector in the Madras Civil Service who was approached by Ramanujan looking for a job in his office. He took a look at Ramanujan's theorems and contacted PV Seshu Aiyar, Ramanujan's math professor at the Government College. Seshu Aiyar got in touch with another mathematician R.Ramachandra Rao, and both arranged a meeting with Ramanujan. Ramachandra Rao was sufficiently impressed with Ramanujan that he offered a monthly stipend to Ramanujan to continue his work with his theorems. Ramanujan could now for the first time work on his passion without having to worry about getting by everyday. But he felt that he was not really earning his stipend without actual work. In 1912, he finally landed a job as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust. This turned out to be most fortuitous because the chairman of the Madras Port Trust was Sir Francis Spring, an engineer with a good bit of knowledge of mathematics who took a great deal of interest in Ramanujan's work. He with the manager SN Aiyar, who was also a well known mathematician, and PV Seshu Aiyar persuaded Ramanujan to write to GH Hardy, the famous English mathematician. The letters are now revealed to have been written mostly by Sir Frances Spring and SN Aiyar because Ramanujan's knowledge of English was lacking.

By that evening after receiving the first Ramanujan letter and pouring over his theorems, GH Hardy and his colleague Littlewood despite their initial skepticism, were convinced that this was the work of a true genius, who needed further guidance to fully recognize his potential. GH Hardy's efforts to get Ramanujan to Cambridge failed, because of his mother's opposition to overseas travel and strong caste convictions. Meanwhile, Ramanujan also had received a scholarship at the University of Madras to pursue his studies, through the auspices of Sir Gilbert Walker.

To get him to come to England, GH Hardy dispatched EH Neville, another Cambridge mathematician, who was to teach a winter course in the Univ of Madras. EH Neville's persuasions might have failed if it had not been for a pilgrimage by Ramanujan, and his parents to the temple of the goddess Namagiri at Namakkal. On the last night, Ramanujan's mother had a dream where he was surrounded by Europeans, and was ordered by the goddess to proceed to England.

Thus began Ramanujan's foray into the world of Western scientific orthodoxy and the eventual relationship with GH Hardy that is now the subject of the play A First Class Man.

(Excerpts from Ramanujan's Notebooks, 1978 by Bruce C Berndt).

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Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary. Bruce C. Berndt and Robert A. Rankin. American Mathematical Society, London Mathematical Society, Providence. 1995.
This is a wonderfully welcome book. The worldwide public has been fortunate to have a variety of biographies of the Indian mathematical genius, Ramanujan.

Most recently, Robert Kanigel published The Man Who Knew Infinity for a broad audience.
Before this, S. R. Ranganathan had published Ramanujan, The Man and the Mathematician. And, of course, there
are the wonderful accounts of Ramanujan's life in G. H. Hardy's Ramanujan, and in Ramanujan's Collected Papers.

However each biography always carries with it some of the views of the author. This is perhaps most strikingly in evidence in the following account that Hardy (taken from page 4 of Ramanujan) provides of
Ramanujan's religious views:

Now the two memoirs of Ramanujan printed in the Papers (and both written by men who, in their different ways, knew him very well) contradict one another flatly about his religion. Seshu Aiyar and Ramanchandra Rao say:
"Ramanujan had definite religious views. He had a special veneration for the Namakkal goddess... He believed in the existence of a Supreme Being and in the attainment of Godhead by men... He had settled convictions about the problem of life and after..."; while I say... his religion was a matter of observance and not of intellectual conviction, and I remember well his telling me (much to my surprise) that all religions seemed to him
more or less equally true...? Which of us is right? For my part I have no doubt at all; I am quite certain that I am. Classical scholars have, I believe, a general principle, difficilior lectio potior, " the more difficult reading is to be preferred" in textual criticism. If the Archbishop of Canterbury tells one man that he (the Archbishop) believes in God, and another that he does not, then it is probably the second assertion which is true, since otherwise it is very
difficult to understand why he should have made it, while there are many excellent reasons for his making the first whether it be true or false. Similarly, if a strict Brahmin like Ramanujan told me, as he certainly did, that he had no definite beliefs, then it is 100 to 1 that he meant what he said.This was no sufficient reason why Ramanujan should outrage the feelings of his parents or his Indian friends. He was not a reasoned infidel, but an "agnostic" in its strict sense, who saw no particular good, and no particular harm, in Hinduism or in any other religion. Hinduism is, far
more, for example, than Christianity, a religion of observance, in which belief counts for extremely little in any case, and if Ramanujan's friends assumed that he accepted the conventional doctrines of such a religion,
and he did not disillusion them, he was practising a quite harmless, and probably necessary, economy of truth.?

To paraphrase what I said in The Hindu (21 December 1987, page 8), the day before the Ramanujan centenary:Hardy believed that Ramanujan was more or less a Western European agnostic. I doubt it. In my dealings with academic Indians, I have found them quite polite. If you contradict their beliefs, I have found few, if any, who would bluntly remark:That's the stupidest remark I've heard! They are more likely to smile and keep their own opinions. I believe that is related to Ramanujan's response to Hardy. Hardy was Ramanujan's great benefactor and was also a man who referred to God as his personal enemy. If you were Ramanujan and you were speaking about religion with Hardy, what could you say that both would be an honest statement consistent with your religious beliefs and would not antagonize your great friend? What could be a better statement than ?... all religions seem... more or less equally true??This statement reflects the great tolerance of Hinduism, and (to paraphrase again):... if Ramanujan's friend (Hardy) assumed that he accepted the conventional doctrines of (agnosticism), and he did not disillusion (him), he was practising a quite harmless, and probably necessary, economy of truth.

According to Kanigel, Ramanujan chose the path of least resistance, giving GK Hardy the idea that he was an agnostic. This is based on Kanigel's observations, that Indian academics are circumspect and given to keeping their beliefs to themselves. Well that is true not just for Indian academics but the Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, Germans, and well nigh everybody in the field of mathematics. They are rarely polemicists, trying to cleave the world like their sociological brethren do. They are not fire and brimstone like Edward Said or like Oriana Fallaci.

My interpretation:

It is more likely that Ramanujan did have strong ideas about religion but he was far too interested in the validation of his work, and chose a pragmatic silence in regards to his religion and avoided a potential minefield with a non-committal statement like 'all religions are equal", which makes him in my eyes, an agnostic. His belief in mathematical proof overrode the proof needed for the existence of God. This should be obvious by the fact that he wrote letters to GK Hardy asking him if his solutions were exemplary. The darker interpretation is, and there is always one, is that he was one of the very few Indians in Cambridge with very little knowledge of how secular an institution this was, specially when the occupying power has slogans like GK Chesterton's, "If God calls you to be a missionary, don't stoop to be a king."

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Srinivasa Ramanujan's religious convictions were inextricably linked to his mathematical genius. In many ways Ramanujan found religion in mathematics and maybe even the opposite could be true, he found something mathematical in religion, especially a religion as polytheistic and amorphous as Hinduism. If there was a genius who could have discoverd a self organizing principle or an algorithm that could define Hinduism, it would be Ramanujan.

However, I have a feeling from what I have read of him, he would be uncomfortable with overtly religious symbols or with the religiosity that we see in the India of today. Certainly, I doubt he would subscribe to the rise of strident Hindu fundamentalism. Ramanujan's religious convictions were intensely private, the discourse limited to conversations or to the rituals of religion. In fact, there seems to be a controversy as to whether at the end of his life, he turned into an atheist.

The Movida poster has Vishnu, the preserver, who is also known as Srinivasa in the South, one of the thousand names that Vishnu is known as. Vishnu's consort is Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth. If there was one goddess that deserted Ramanujan in his mortal life, it would have to be Lakshmi, because he died in penury.

Bhavna disagrees," Atheism vs. Religion is probably the most important theme--a man of faith meets a man without. The clash of cultures that Ramanujan undergoes is primarily based on his being a brahmin and
indoctrination in hindu rituals......"

I have no problem with this premise because it extends to Ramanujan's world, a private world. A world that clashed with GK Hardy's. However the poster says more. It creates the impression that religion was the only issue that kept the two protagonists apart. It is true that Hardy was a fierce atheist but he was also a man with a dysfunctional personality, a bachelor, who never formed very strong bonds or relationships with most people, even his peers. He was most comfortable and animated talking about mathematics and/ or cricket. The main point of the religious divide pertains to the mathematical aspect. How is it that a person with no rigorous training and just his religious orthodoxy come up with such fantastical solutions? If Ramanujan had not been an iota religious, the story would have been less compelling but the relationship would have ended the same way.

In reference to Ramanujan "G. H. Hardy, an atheist, believed him to be essentially agnostic as far as metaphysical matters were concerned. It is also said that Ramanujan, who struggled for a long time with severe illness which tended to impede his mathematical output, said in frustrated agony, while in his death throes, that he did not believe in God. Hardy reported a statement of Ramanujan's to the effect that all religions are equally correct."

In an interview by Paul Erdős, when Hardy was asked what his greatest contribution to mathematics was, Hardy unhesitatingly replied that it was the discovery of Ramanujan. He called their collaboration "the one romantic incident in my life." In the closeted world of Cambridge academics it was the closest that Hardy had come to acknowledging who he was. This statement reveals more about the nature of their relationship, their attraction and differences between each other, rather than the religious equation.

Posted by Shourin Roy at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TRIBUTE
In the Bradman class
GIRIDHAR KHASNIS


The mathematical genius who discovered Ramanujan retained an undying interest in the game of cricket.
"Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better)."

"Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class."

G. H. Hardy

An elderly English gentleman sits in a corner of my bookshelf; he's been there for more than two decades now. Impeccably dressed, a cigarette dangling between his fingers, the rim of jumbo black spectacles sliding down his sharp nose, his small frame somewhat dwarfed by an oversized cane chair, right leg crossed on the left knee...

Surprisingly, the photographer who has perked up the telling picture of G.H. Hardy is unnamed both on the covers or the insides of A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge University Press). Hardy couldn't have cared less; he would have, perhaps, been happier without his picture on the cover. Among the eccentricities of the mathematical genius was an abiding aversion for photographs and mechanical gadgets (in particular, telephone). He never used a watch and couldn't bear the sight of a shaving mirror; when he went to a hotel, his first action was to cover all the looking glasses with towels!


Hardy was brilliant, unorthodox, eccentric, radical, immensely charming with child-like openness, ready to talk about anything, shy and self-conscious in all actions, remarkably honest about his own abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and obsessively heliotropic, trying to catch each ray of the winter sun.

Precise and engrossing

In a postcard to his friend, Hardy (during the 1920s) listed six New Year wishes: (1) prove the Riemann hypothesis; (2) make 211 not out in the fourth innings of the last Test Match at Oval; (3) find an argument for the non-existence of God which shall convince the general public; (4) be the first man at the top of Mount Everest; (5) be proclaimed the first president of the USSR or of Great Britain and Germany; (6) murder Mussolini.

A Mathematician's Apology is an incredibly precise and thoroughly engrossing piece of literature. In no more than 90 pages, Hardy leads the reader through labyrinths of an absorbing mathematical journey. Rich in insight, scrupulous in detail, this part-autobiographical and part-philosophical treatise is a testimony of Hardy's literary scholarship as much as to his own unique personality. When Apology was first published in 1940, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'.

In a stimulating and comprehensive foreword, C P Snow seems to agree with Greene's opinion about Apology: "Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candor are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist." Snow also confesses his association with Hardy as "intellectually the most valuable friendship of my life". He tells us how the brilliant mathematician possessed a character as beautiful and candid as his mind; how he was one of the finest mathematical thinkers, and `for a short time, the fifth best pure mathematician in the world'; how Hardy's association with Littlewood was "the most famous collaboration in the history of mathematics" and how Hardy-Littlewood researches dominated English pure mathematics, and much of world pure mathematics: "Together they produced nearly 100 papers, a good many of them in the Bradman class."

Hardy remained a bachelor all his life. Besides mathematics, Hardy had another passion; an undying love for the game of cricket, which he quite literally sustained to the very last minute of his life. Snow recalls that Hardy "had a horror of persons, who devotedly studied the literature but had never played the game (of cricket)." Hardy himself clarifies in Apology: "Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better)."

Hardy had no faith in intuitions or impressions; "his own or anyone else's". Snow evokes the mathematician's refusal to go into any college chapel even for formal business, like electing a master. "He had clerical friends, but God was his personal enemy." By the way, Hardy was, for two years (1924-26), President of the Association of Scientific Workers; though he sarcastically admitted to being "an odd choice" and "the most unpractical member of the most unpractical profession in the world."

Romantic incident
Hardy acknowledged that discovery of Ramanujan was "the one romantic incident" of his life. That historic morning, early in 1913, is recounted delightfully by Snow, when Hardy found, among the letters on his breakfast table, a large untidy envelope decorated with Indian stamp: "He glanced at the letter, written in halting English, signed by an unknown Indian, asking him to give an opinion of these mathematical discoveries... Hardy was not only bored, but irritated... Wild theorems. Theorems such as he had never seen before, nor imagined. A fraud of genius? A question was forming itself in his mind (throughout the day)... He sent word to Littlewood ... By nine o'clock or so they were in one of Hardy's rooms, with the manuscript stretched out in front of them... Before midnight they knew, and knew for certain. The writer of these manuscripts was a man of genius."

Hardy suffered a coronary thrombosis in 1939 (a year before he wrote Apology). He recovered, but the physical activities he loved were over for good. Snow recognises Apology being a book of haunting sadness. "

When the War began, Hardy was further depressed. Like his friend Bertrand Russell, he too believed that the War should never have been fought. In early 1947, driven by despair and depression, Hardy tried to kill himself. The attempt failed, but his condition only got worse. In the nursing home, he got a black eye, hitting his head on the lavatory basin.

"After that, I went to Cambridge at least once a week," writes Snow. "I dreaded each visit ... he talked a little, nearly every time I saw him, about death. He wanted it: he didn't fear it: what was there to fear in nothingness?...Mostly, though - about fifty-five minutes in each hour I was with him - I had to talk cricket. It was his only solace..."

Snow remembers his last visit to Hardy, four or five days before he died. There was an Indian test team playing in Australia and they talked about them. "It was in that same week that he told his sister: `If I knew that I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.' He managed something very similar. Each evening that week before she left him, she read a chapter from a history of Cambridge university cricket. One such chapter contained the last words he heard, for he died suddenly, in the early morning. "

I must have read the Apology and Snow's foreword at least a dozen times. Each time I have finished, I have come a bit closer to realising what it takes one to be in the Bradman class.

From the Hindu, 17/07/2006
(http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2006/07/16/stories/2006071600230400.htm)

Posted by Shourin Roy at 03:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From a beautiful little story that gives an insight into Ramunujan's peculiar genius:

"Once, in the taxi from London, Hardy noticed its number, 1729.