Infinity + more

Sandwiched between storefronts advertising bathroom fittings and 'instant xerox' on Kumbakonam's Sarangapani Sannathi street is a tiny, tiled-roof house, the pillars of its traditional thinnai (verandah) painted bright blue. Visitors from across the world — from backpacking students to greying academics — pick their way to this house in south Tamil Nadu, where mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887. It was from this house that the boy made his way to school, baffling teachers with logic, his love for maths and questions on everything from zero to infinity.
Over the years since his death on April 26, 1920 at the age of 32, the world has slowly discovered the genius of the man whose formulae were considered beautiful but sometimes obscure. "It was nearly 100 years after his death that scientists had computer programmes which could prove Ramanujan's formula to calculate 'pi' upto 17 million places," says K Srinivasa Rao, retired professor, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, who has "dedicated (his) life post-retirement to Ramanujan".
Some of Ramanujan's mathematics was understood before his death — his contemporaries understood that he had an almost intuitive genius for figuring out the laws that govern numbers. "In fact, G H Hardy, the Cambridge don Ramanujan wrote to, first tossed aside the unwieldy envelope full of hypotheses," says Rao. By chance, he picked up the 12-page letter again and started seeing bits of sense in the theorems unsupported by proof.
Ramanujan was then, in 1912, working at the Madras Port Trust, as a clerk in the accountantgeneral's office for a salary of £20 a year, having failed his FA (First Examination in Arts) twice. "He had no interest in his non-mathematical courses. He didn't appear for his history and physiology papers," says professor A R Venkatachalapathy of Madras Institute of Development Studies, who stumbled upon Ramanujan's marksheet 22 years ago. The general perception is that Ramanujan failed and was subsequently 'discovered' by the British — Port Trust's Sir Francis Spring, University of Madras professor E H Neville and finally Cambridge's legendary G H Hardy, who ensured Ramanujan's sailing to Britain in 1914 and publishing 21 papers over five years.
Though the Hardy-Ramanujan equation helped groom the self-taught "Hindoo calculator" , as the British press called him then, Ramanujan was seen as gifted from his school days. "My father was Ramanujan's classmate and spent a lot of time with him," says G Meenakshi Sundaram, who now lives in Chennai. "Ramanujan was always scribbling away on paper or slate. He would analyse the curves in a person's signature and talk about its properties," she adds.
It was this seemingly haphazard way of working that made it hard to follow Ramanujan's mathematical trail. He probably used a slate to jot down formulae, prove them, and erase them after recording just the final result in his notebook or on sheets of paper. In 1976, professor George E Andrews of Pennsylvania State University found a box of papers, which eventually became the 'lost notebook' of Ramanujan.
"He left behind 3,254 entries. No proof, only results," says Rao. "Generations of mathematicians have been working on proving his theorems that find use in modern fields such as coding theory and superstring theory. Some are false, most are valid."
Though Ramanujan's work still fascinates the West and Hardy made every effort to groom him, the young mathematician was self-taught and his presentation style resembled that of Indian texts, which often list results without any indication of how they are derived, according to George Gheverghese Joseph, author of The Crest of the Peacock and honorary reader at Manchester University. In his book, he says, "In India, astrology, astronomy and mathematics are very much part of the numerate work tradition. In trying to find the positions of planets and stars it is necessary to use mathematical calculations." Ramanujan had a deep interest in astrology, probably inherited from his mother. "There are not very many English homes where the ability to compute with numbers would have that much fascination. There seems to be a sort of intuitive understanding (in Ramanujan)... a feel for numbers," Joseph writes.
Ramanujan was known to be religious and once said: "An equation means nothing to me, unless it represents a thought of God." He credited his mathematical acumen to his family goddess Namagiri, which often infuriated Hardy who was an atheist. This would have been just one of the cultural contradictions Ramanujan faced when he travelled abroad. In a letter from England in 1914 to his friend Krishna Rao, Ramanujan writes, "I have no other go but to cook for myself. There is no place where I can get vegetarian food. I will be obliged if you can send me some tamarind (seeds removed) and good coconut oil."
Historians say it was probably the lack of vegetarian food, especially during the hard days of World War I, that led to the deterioration of Ramanujan's health, which was never robust. He contracted TB and in 1919 returned to India to recover. His wife Janaki, who he married when he was 22 and she was just nine, nursed him till his death. The couple had hardly spent much time together — she lived with her parents till she came of age in 1912. By then, he was already immersed in his theorems and soon left for Britain.
"After his death, she spent eight years in Bombay with her brother," says Rao, who knew Janaki till her death in 1994. "She learnt tailoring and English, but she was deprived of her money. So in 1931, she took the bold decision to return to Madras and live on her own." She took on seamstress work to make ends meet.
After Ramanujan's 75th birth anniversary celebrations , when mathematicians from abroad came to visit her, she started receiving pensions from the University of Madras, Port Trust, and various governments and institutions.
In often odd but always laudatory ways, Ramanujan's name remains a household one. "My father would scold me for scoring badly in maths. Now I scold my children, saying, 'How can you do badly in maths when you were born on the same street as Ramanujan?," laughs Srinivasa Gopalan, who runs a hotel on Sarangapani Sannathi street.