Where do ideas come from? Have you ever thought about that? For example, you are trying to solve a problem and you are looking for the right solution, trying different approaches but no luck. And then, suddenly, the right idea strikes you like a lightning. Where did it come from? It’s not like you developed it step-by-step, built it from the ground up – it just appeared out of the blue.
Or maybe you are trying to write something, looking for the right words. At first, it doesn’t go well, but then an inspiration appears out of nowhere and the words are flowing out of you like a river – exactly what you wanted but couldn’t do just a moment ago.
It happens without any notice, while sleeping or showering, running or focusing on something else, and suddenly you have a ‘Eureka!’ moment – a thought comes in, and idea, escorted by a very specific physical feeling, and you have to write it down, remember it, or try it out, better immediately. Where did all these ideas come from?
Srinivasa Ramanujan knew the answer. For him, the ideas were brought by Namagiri Thayar, a form of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi and the patron of his family. It may sound weird or even nonsense, but there are actually good reasons to believe him. Why? Because Ramanujan was one of the most exceptional mathematicians ever.
Ramanujan was born in India on December 22, 1887. His father worked as a clerk and his mother was a housewife and sang at a local temple. She thought him the Brahmin culture: Traditions, religious songs, maintaining strict vegetarianism, and more. When he was young, the two of them dueled at the strategic game Goats and Tigers (or “Lambs and Tigers”). In the game, three “tigers” seek to kill fifteen “goats” by jumping them, as in checkers, while the goats try to immobilize the tigers.
The family deity was the goddess Namagiri. Ramanujan’s maternal grandmother was a devotee of Namagiri and was said to enter a trance to speak to her. One time, before Ramanujan’s birth, Namagiri revealed to her that the goddess would one day speak through her daughter’s son. His parents, since they were childless for some years after they married, prayed to Namagiri for a child. The prayers were answered and Ramanujan (literally, “younger brother of Rama”, a Hindu deity) came to the world.
Ramanujan grew-up as a self-taught mathematical prodigy. To slightly increase the family’s poor income, Ramanujan’s family often took in boarders. Around the time he was eleven, there were two of them, students at the nearby college. Noticing Ramanujan’s interest in mathematics, they fed it with whatever they knew. Within months he had exhausted their knowledge and was pestering them for math texts from the college library. Among those they brought to him was an advanced book on Trigonometry. By the time Ramanujan was thirteen, he had mastered it.
In 1903, when he was sixteen, Ramanujan obtained a library copy of A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, G. S. Carr’s, containing a collection of 5,000 theorems. In 1904, soon after discovering Carr’s book, Ramanujan graduated from high school and entered a college with a scholarship. However, the book ignited a spark in him: Until then, he’d kept mathematics in balance with the rest of his life, but now, inspired, he lost interest in everything else. Each theorem was its own little research project and he couldn’t get enough of it. Meanwhile, he ignored other classes he was supposed to be studying; So eventually he failed English composition. E. H. Neville, an English mathematician who later befriended Ramanujan, observed that “to the college authorities, he was just a student who was neglecting flagrantly all but one of the subjects he was supposed to be studying. The penalty was inevitable: his scholarship was taken away.”
Continuing to pursue independent research in mathematics, he lived in extreme poverty and was often on the brink of starvation. Slowly, he began to get some recognition in Madras’s mathematical circles while still looking for financial support. Eventually, he found a job as an accounting clerk. At his office, Ramanujan easily and quickly completed the work he was given and spent his spare time doing mathematical research.
He desperately looked for a like-minded person, a kindred spirit; Someone who we understand his findings, with who he will be able to share his mathematical discoveries. Finally, he found G. H. Hardy.
Hardy was a well-known professor from the University of Cambridge, England. At the time, he noted a mathematical issue that has not yet been defined. Ramanujan was surprised because he was able to define it. He sent a letter with his various results to Hardy, which later wrote that they “defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before. A single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.”
However, Ramanujan’s work, since he hadn’t received proper formal training, required refinement and adaptation for academic writing, including formal proofs and established facts. Hardy managed to arrange for Ramanujan to receive a scholarship and planned Ramanujan’s trip to Cambridge.
One of the problems was that in accordance with his Brahmin upbringing, Ramanujan refused to leave his country to “go to a foreign land”. This was resolved after Ramanujan’s mother had a vivid dream in which the family goddess, the deity of Namagiri, commanded her “to stand no longer between her son and the fulfilment of his life’s purpose”. In March 1914 Ramanujan sailed for England.
During Ramanujan’s stay in England, he reached impressive achievements that earned him great appreciation and fame. During this period, he published many articles with astonishing results, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London and a member of an academy at Trinity College.
Unfortunately, Ramanujan suffered from various diseases even before traveling to England. From May 1917 his health began to deteriorate greatly and he went in and out of tuberculosis treatment institutions for almost two years. The First World War and the lack of vegetables during that time didn’t help either.
According to Hardy’s advice, in early 1919, after almost five years in England, Ramanujan sailed back to India, hoping that the familiar environment would improve with his health. Unfortunately, returning home did not improve his condition and despite the dedicated care he received, Ramanujan died on April 26, 1920, in Madras, when he was only 32 years old.
Ramanujan credits his mathematical findings to Namagiri. According to Ramanujan, she appeared to him in visions, proposing mathematical formulas that he would then have to verify. For him, numbers and their mathematical relationships revealed something divine about the universe. He once said that “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”
References:
- Kanigel, Robert (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: a Life of the Genius Ramanujan. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
- Reminiscences and Discoveries on Ramanujan Bust by S. Chandrasekhar, F.R.S., University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.
- Proceedings of the Royal Society A 99, xiii-xxix)
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