Remembering Ramanujan

“An equation to me is meaningless unless it expresses a thought of God” – Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dec 22 1887 – April 26 1920 )

A man whose leaps of inspiration enriched the domain of number theory so much so that research into his works are still in progress. Only as recently as February, a group of mathematicians announced that they have finally solved the mystery of the mock theta functions that Ramanujan wrote about, just two months before his demise (http://www.news.wisc.edu/13497.html).

It has been almost a hundred years now since he parted ways with the world and we are yet to see a genius of his caliber in mathematics from India. We do keep reading about precocious kids who can add and multiply numbers really fast and somehow this gets portrayed as mathematics. These gifted people however extraordinary they may seem make no more mathematicians as knowing the names of planes makes one a pilot.

It is a pity that we have not been able to produce another genius of his kind in all these years. We may have not uncovered many Ramanujans who have faded into obscurity and mediocrity due to lack of encouragement and focus.

The current education system does not offer this luxury. We almost lost Ramanujan to the rigidity of the system.

Ramanujan was never able to pass his higher education simply because the system refused to take cognizance of his genius in mathematics and insisted that he pass every subject in his course. It was only persistence on his part and that of his friends, most notably Professor Hardy that he was able to achieve what he did in his brief lifetime.

The gift of mathematics is a rare one indeed and it would be a shame if we let these prodigies go undetected or force fitted to be compliant with the crowd around them. Because when it comes to mathematics, there are only two kinds of people…those who know maths and those who don’t. And we simply cannot afford to lose those who know….

This post is in memory of the genius that was Ramanujan.

Post Script: If you would like to know more, I strongly recommend the book ‘The man who knew infinity’ by Robert Kanigel. It is one of the best biographies I have read. Kanigel has handled some of the sensibilities and the problems unique to the Indian psyche extremely well without being judgmental about them.