{"id":85748,"date":"2019-06-20T14:41:30","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T21:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/?p=85748"},"modified":"2019-06-20T15:58:57","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T22:58:57","slug":"archives-flashback-srinivasa-ramanujan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconeer.com\/current\/archives-flashback-srinivasa-ramanujan\/","title":{"rendered":"ARCHIVES: Flashback:\u00a0Srinivasa Ramanujan:\u00a0The Man and The Genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, that has survived countless humanitarian arguments…was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.\u201d So said his contemporary E.H. Neville. Deepak Goyal<\/b> presents a profile.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Cover of Siliconeer (Feb. 2000 – Vol I Issue 1)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Imagine an impoverished twenty- something clerk. His formal credentials were even less than modest. To put it bluntly, he had twice flunked the F.A. exam roughly equivalent to the U.S. high school diploma.
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His poverty was grinding, and he was not always in good health. Hardly a resume to impress, but this man, who lived only till he was 32, went on to Cambridge and left a legacy in mathematics that is recognized today internationally as a lasting contribution.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan\u2019s contribution transcends mathematics. He presented an inspiration for his nation, then still ruled by the British, by proving by example that Indians were the intellectual equal of the West.
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\u201cRamanujan\u2019s career, just because he was a mathematician, is of unique importance to the development of relations between India and England,\u201d according to his contemporary mathematician E.H. Neville, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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\u201cIndia has produced great scientists, but (J.C.) Bose and (C.V.) Raman were educated outside India, and no one can say how much of their inspiration was derived from the great laboratories in which their formative years were spent and from the famous men who taught them.
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\u201cIndia has produced great poets and philosophers, but there is a subtle tinge of patronage in all commendation in alien literature.
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\u201cOnly in mathematics are the standards unassailable, and therefore of all Indians, Ramanujan was the first whom the English knew to be innately equal of their greatest men.
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\u201cThe mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, the offensive assumption that has survived countless humanitarian arguments and political appeals and poisoned countless approaches between England and India, was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Born in December 1887 in the Tamil Nadu town of Erode, Ramanujan showed his precocious insights early on as a schoolboy.
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In an arithmetic class, a teacher said: \u201cIf three bananas are given to three boys, each boy would get a banana.\u201d The teacher generalized this idea. Then Ramanujan asked: \u201cSir, if no banana is distributed to no student, would everybody still get a banana?\u201d
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In his schooldays he was passionately involved with numbers, devising magic squares, and by the eighth grade he had mastered Loney\u2019s Trigonometry, a standard undergraduate text.
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When he was 16, he got hold of a book of pure mathematics, G.S. Carr\u2019s A Synopsis of Elementary Results.
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He passed the matriculation exam \u2013 equivalent to 10th grade \u2013 in 1904. Although he joined the Madras Govt. Arts College for its two-year pre-university F.A. program, his passion for mathematics at the expense of everything else cost him dearly.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The program covered English, Sanskrit, mathematics, physiology, and the history of Rome and Greece, but he was interested only in math.<\/span>
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He failed the year ending examination, and lost his scholarship in 1905.
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He entered a very trying period of his life. He took the F.A. exam privately in 1907, but did not pass, despite getting a perfect score in math.
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Between 1906-1912 Ramanujan was constantly in search of a benefactor and a job to support himself. He tutored students in mathematics in Kumbhakonam, later even sought employment as a tutor. He lamented to a friend that he was probably destined to die in poverty like Galileo.
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Happily, he was proven wrong as a host of distinguished Indian and British math lovers joined hands in slowly but surely rescuing this brilliant mathematician from obscurity.
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In 1910, Prof. Ramaswamy Iyer, founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, was at Salem. Ramanujan went to him and asked for a clerical job.
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All he had was notebooks filled with magic squares, prime numbers, infinite series, divergent series, Bernoulli Numbers, Riemann Zeta Function, partitions, hypergeometric series.
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Iyer was impressed. He sent Ramanujan to Madras with a letter of introduction to Prof. P.V. Seshu Iyer at Presidency College. Seshu Iyer, equally impressed, sent him to a lover of mathematics, Dewan Bahadur R. Ramachandra Rao, the district collector in Nellore.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In December 1910 Ramanujan arrived at Nellore. This was the turning point.
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Ramachandra Rao remembered Ramanujan as a \u201cshort uncouth figure, stout, unshaved, not overclean, with one conspicuous feature \u2013 shining eyes, (who) walked in with a frayed notebook under his arm.
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\u201cHe was miserably poor. He had run away from Kumbhakonam to get leisure in Madras to pursue his studies.
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\u201cHe never craved for any distinction. He wanted leisure, in other words, simple food to be provided for him.\u201d
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Rao undertook Ramanujan\u2019s expenses in Madras for some time.
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Meanwhile Seshu Iyer presented the earliest contributions of Ramanujan to the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.
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Ramanujan lived in a small house in Madras, accepting reluctantly monthly assistance from the Nellore district collector for a year. Later, he declined assistance and ended up as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust.
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S. Narayana Iyer, manager of the port trust, helped him. He was key in getting Ramanujan the lifelong support of Sir Francis Spring, chairman of the Madras Port Trust.
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Narayana Iyer\u2019s son recalls how his father and Ramanujan worked on math problems.
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Every night his father and Ramanujan used to work on two big-sized slates, sitting in a parapet upstairs, till about 11:30 p.m., he said, ruefully adding that \u201cit was a source of nuisance to other inmates who used to sleep in adjoining rooms. I distinctly remember the noise of the slate pencils which used to be background music for my sleep.
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\u201cI have seen Ramanujan get up at 2 o\u2019clock in the night and note down something in the slate in the dull light of the hurricane lamp.
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\u201cHe used to work at mathematics in his dreams and now he was jotting the results on the slate.\u201d
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At the suggestion of Seshu Iyer, Ramanujan wrote to Godfrey. H. Hardy, a world famous mathematician who was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a math lecturer at Cambridge.
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Ramanujan wrote his historic letter Jan. 16, 1913, and thus began an enduring mathematical partnership.
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Hardy\u2019s reply dated Feb. 8 was the starting point of Ramanujan\u2019s recognition in the Western world.
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Dr. Gilbert T. Walker, a former Cambridge Trinity College fellow, during a visit to Madras, was impressed with Ramanujan\u2019s work and wrote to the University of Madras registrar that Ramanujan\u2019s work was \u201ccomparable in originality with that of a mathematics fellow in a Cambridge college, though lacking in the precision and completeness necessary in establishing the universal validity of the results.\u201d
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Walker said the university should enable Ramanujan for \u201ca few years at least to spend the whole of his time on mathematics without any anxiety as to his livelihood.\u201d
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The university agreed, and in May 1913, the 26-year-old Ramanujan, who had failed its F.A. exam twice, became the University of Madras\u2019s first research scholar with a stipend of Rs. 75 per month for two years.
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Meanwhile in Cambridge, Hardy was keen to get Ramanujan there, even though Ramanujan was initially reluctant.
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Mathematician E.H. Neville, another Trinity fellow, was a visiting lecturer to Madras in 1914.
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Neville wrote to the governor of Madras, and the University of Madras agreed to give Ramanujan a scholarship.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ramanujan changed his traditional Brahmin hairstyle of shaved head with tuft of hair and got his hair trimmed in European style, and left for England in March 1914.
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Unfortunately his stay in England was overlapped by World War I, which may have resulted in his getting less attention than he deserved.
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But Ramanujan\u2019s mathematical acuity was never in doubt.
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For instance, at a lecture of elliptical integrals at Cambridge, the instructor was working out some formulae. A glance at Ramanujan\u2019s face, alight with excitement, caused him to ask whether he was following the lecture and whether he had anything to say. At this Ramanujan went to the blackboard and, much to everyone\u2019s surprise, wrote down some of the results which were yet to be proved.
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Life for an orthodox Brahmin was difficult in other ways, but Ramanujan persevered.
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He initially asked for South Indian food items like tamarind and coconut oil by post parcel, as well as from a company in London but in January, 1915, he wrote to a friend: \u201cNow as well as in the future I am not in need of anything, as I gained control over my taste and can live on mere rice with a little salt and lemon juice for an indefinite period.\u201d Milk and fruits helped.
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After about a year and a half in Cambridge, Hardy wrote to the University in Madras: \u201cRamanujan is beyond question the best Indian mathematician of modern times. He will always be rather eccentric, but of his extraordinary gifts there can be no questions.
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\u201cIn some ways, he is the most remarkable mathematician I have ever known.\u201d
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In June 1916, in an official report Hardy wrote to the to registrar: \u201cIt is already safe to say that Mr. Ramanujan has justified abundantly all the hopes that were based upon his work in India and has shown that he possesses powers as remarkable in their way as those of any living mathematician.\u201d
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Although his health was reasonably good for the first three years in Cambridge, in May 1917, he was first admitted to Cambridge nursing hostel for five months. He suffered from night fever, malaise, weight loss and fits of depression so severe that he once tried to commit suicide. Modern biographers speculate that he might have been suffering from amebiasis.
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He was in and out of tuberculosis sanatoria. After considerable treatment for TB, he improved in 1918.
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In the same year he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and elected to a Trinity College fellowship worth \u00a3250 annually for six years, both firsts for an Indian.
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After five years in Cambridge, he left England in February 1919.
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He arrived in India four weeks later \u2013 pale, emaciated, but with a scientific standing and reputation unprecedented for an Indian.
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At his request, the University of Madras granted him a scholarship of 250 pounds a year for five years.
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Unfortunately his health did not improve.
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He relapsed, with severe bouts of stomach pain, depression, and even had a premonition of his death. He was brought for expert medical treatment in January 1920. His end came April 26, 1920. He was 32 years, 4 months and 4 days.<\/span><\/p>\n

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His achievement outlived his death and continued to inspire Indians. Nobel laureate astrophysicist Subramanyam Chandrashekhar said in a lecture: \u201cPerhaps the best way I can give you a feeling for what Ramanujan meant to the young men going to schools and colleges during the period 1915-1930 is to recall for you in the way in which I first learned of Ramanujan\u2019s name. It had been a day in April 1920 when I was not quite 10 years old when my mother told me of an item in the newspaper of a famous Indian mathematician, Ramanujan by name, (who) had died the preceding day.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThough I had no idea at that time of what kind of mathematician Ramanujan was, or indeed what scientific achievement meant, I can still recall the gladness I felt on the assurance that one brought up under circumstances similar to my own, could have achieved what I could not grasp.
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\u201cI think it is fair to say that almost all the mathematicians who reached distinction during the three or four decades following Ramanujan were directly or indirectly inspired by his example.\u201d
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Ramanujan\u2019s contribution to mathematics is hard to describe in nontechnical terms, but what can be said is that his reputation has become internationally secure over the years.
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In 1927, Cambridge published 355 pages of Ramanujan\u2019s Collected Works of almost everything he published and the floodgates opened as the wider mathematical world took notice. In the next few years dozens of papers like \u201cTwo Assertions Made by Ramanujan,\u201d \u201cNote on a Problem of Ramanujan,\u201d appeared in journals.
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Ramanujan\u2019s hypothesis or the Tau Conjecture, presented in a 1916 paper, kept mathematicians in knots until Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne proved it in 1974, an event described as \u201cone of the celebrated events of 20th century mathematics,\u201d which won Deligne the Field Prize, the mathematician\u2019s Nobel prize.
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A 1917 Hardy-Ramanujan paper is considered the founding document in the field of probabilistic number theory.
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\u201cFor the decade ending in 1988, a computer search of the literature revealed, some three hundred papers referred to Ramanujan in their titles or their abstracts,\u201d according to Ramanujan biographer Robert Kanigel.
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Norwegian Atle Selberg, the world\u2019s most famous number theorist, came upon an article by Ramanujan in 1934.
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He has said that it was \u201ca revelation \u2013 a completely different world to me, quite different from any mathematics book I had ever seen \u2013 with much more appeal to the imagination. It was really what gave the impetus which gave the impetus which started my own mathematical work.\u201d
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Later his father presented him with his own copy of the collected papers of Ramanujan which he carries with him still.
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\u201cThat was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan \u2013 He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover,\u201d says mathematician Freeman Dyson, who first discovered Ramanujan\u2019s work in the 1940s. \u201cIn the years since that happy day, I have been intermittently coming back to Ramanujan\u2019s garden. Every time when I come back, I find fresh flowers blooming.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, that has survived countless humanitarian arguments…was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.\u201d So said his contemporary E.H. Neville. Deepak Goyal presents a profile. Imagine an impoverished twenty- something clerk. His formal credentials were even less…<\/p>\n

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