A DEEPLY obscure mathematician with an eccentric personal life wins a Nobel prize. He becomes the subject of an acclaimed biography, which forms the basis of a hugely successful Hollywood movie. Sounds familiar? The mathematician is, of course, , who was played by Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
Now a similar sequence looks set to play out with the . During 2007, Ramanujan’s life and work have been the subject of a sold-out stage play, A Disappearing Number, at London’s Barbican Centre, and no less than three rival movie projects. Two of these emanate from Hollywood: one has a screenplay by Stephen Fry, the other is based on an influential biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity, by Robert Kanigel, published back in 1991. The third movie project originates from a noted director in India, . Ramanujan is also the eponymous subject of , a novel by the American literature professor David Leavitt on which Fry’s screenplay is based, newly published by Bloomsbury Publishing of Harry Potter fame.
While Ramanujan is slightly better known than Nash was before the movie, most of us in the US and Europe have probably yet to hear of him. In India, however, and among mathematicians everywhere, he is already a legend. In Ramanujan’s own time, leading mathematicians compared him to Karl Jacobi and David Hilbert, while a recent New Scientist review article by the mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin placed Ramanujan with the all-time mathematical greats Euler and Cantor (28 July, p 49). The American mathematicians George Andrews and Bruce Berndt have spent decades studying Ramanujan’s notebooks, trying to prove some of his unproved theorems.
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Even those who cannot grasp a line of Ramanujan’s mathematics are beguiled by his life: an east-west story of rags to intellectual riches. It is almost reminiscent of the Einstein phenomenon: “Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?” a genuinely puzzled Einstein once asked. Nearly everyone seems to have liked Ramanujan during his all-too-brief life in India and England. But no one, bar a handful of mathematicians, understood his revolutionary achievements in number theory and power series, most notably his theorem concerning the partition of numbers into a sum of smaller integers.
Ramanujan, born in 1887, was an impoverished, devout Brahmin clerk working at the Madras Port Trust. Self-taught in mathematics, he claimed to be inspired by the Hindu goddess Namagiri. He used to say: “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.”
Lacking any other outlet, in 1913 he mailed some of his theorems, without proofs, to G. H. Hardy, a leading mathematician at the University of Cambridge. So transcendently original were the formulae that Hardy yanked Ramanujan from obscurity to Trinity College Cambridge, collaborated extensively with him, published many joint papers, and demonstrated that he was a mathematical genius. In 1918, Ramanujan became the first Indian to be elected a fellow of the modern Royal Society and Trinity College. After succumbing to a mysterious illness and attempting suicide on the London Underground, he returned to India to recuperate, still producing major theorems on his sickbed, and died at the age of just 32.
“Lacking any other outlet, Ramanujan mailed his theorems to Cambridge”
Long after his death, Hardy wrote of Ramanujan: “The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity… His ideas as to what constituted a mathematical proof were of the most shadowy description. All his results, new and old, right or wrong, had been arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account.”
Kanigel, in his masterly biography, writes that “Ramanujan’s life was like the Bible or Shakespeare – a rich find of data, lush with ambiguity, that holds up a mirror to ourselves or our age”. He gives some fascinating examples. The Indian school system flunked Ramanujan in his teens, but a few individuals in India sensed his brilliance and rescued him from near starvation by getting him his clerk’s job. In England, Hardy drove Ramanujan so hard that he may have hastened his death.
Had Ramanujan received Cambridge-style mathematical training in his early life he might have reached still greater heights – or it might have stifled his originality. Hardy, an atheist, was convinced that religion had nothing to do with Ramanujan’s intellectual power, but it is at least plausible that India’s long-standing mystical attraction to the concept of the infinite was a vital source of Ramanujan’s creativity. “Was Ramanujan’s life a tragedy of unfulfilled promise? Or did his five years in Cambridge redeem it?” asks Kanigel. “In each case, the evidence [leaves] ample room to see it either way.”
Leavitt is alive to these ambiguities, and has clearly done detailed research on Ramanujan, Hardy, the world of Edwardian Cambridge – wranglers, homosexuality, the Apostles, Bertrand Russell’s pacifism and so forth – and the home front during the first world war. Leavitt respects historical facts where they are known, but also admits to inventing important chunks of plot from the scantiest of evidence, or even no evidence.
For example, it is known that Hardy – whose fictional confessions form the spine of the novel – was gay. Yet there were no obvious homoerotic elements in his relationship with Ramanujan, and there exists no clear evidence (nor even much gossip) to prove that Hardy practised sodomy – unlike some other members of the Apostles, such as John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. Nonetheless, Leavitt harps throughout on Hardy’s sexuality, inventing a subplot in which Hardy seduces a wounded soldier, and a far-fetched encounter with a handsome London policeman who humiliates Hardy for being “queer”. There is absolutely no evidence for these episodes, as Leavitt frankly admits.
The result is a book that does not convince overall, but is never less than engaging and intelligent. It smoothly integrates the mathematics with the effects of war on Cambridge and London, atmospherically evoked: Trinity College’s Great Court is turned into a hospital; a Zeppelin raid on London strikes Ramanujan as divine punishment for his lapse from strict vegetarianism. One thing Leavitt lacks is a feel for crucial nuances of the imperial relationship; he is no E. M. Forster and lacks Kanigel’s obvious affection for south Indian culture.
“He saw a Zeppelin raid as divine punishment for a lapse from vegetarianism”
How close was the real Hardy – who never visited India – to Ramanujan, beyond their twin obsession with mathematics? Could Hardy’s well-known reserve, verging on indifference to others, have contributed to Ramanujan’s fatal illness? Judging from Hardy’s actual letters and writings, which reveal his ignorance of Ramanujan’s home culture, the two were certainly not intimate. Leavitt seems to accept this when he writes of Hardy at the very end: “He was too old to believe any longer that he had touched more than a fragment of that vast, infernal mind.” Yet within the novel he has Hardy dwell implausibly on the mores and motives of Ramanujan’s caste-bound mother and child wife in far-away India.
The Indian Clerk begins with a lucid quotation from A Mathematician’s Apology, Hardy’s melancholy 1940 memoir about his fading mathematical powers, which Graham Greene hailed as “the best account of what it is like to be a creative artist”. The real Hardy wrote that “Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.” Leavitt’s fictional Hardy goes on to speak in a very different voice, and to my mind this mismatch diminishes our understanding of the real Ramanujan and the reasons for the growing fame he commands long after his death.
The Indian Clerk
Bloomsbury