Monday, April 11, 2005
The man who knew Infinity
Before I start this post, let me confess something that will not exactly be relished by most of the readers of my blog. I love mathematics. It’s considered to be one of the most hated subjects by people all around the world but I just love it. No, not that kind of maths that stares at you openly from the question papers of competitive exams and delights in torturing you, making you barely cross the cut-offs in that section. I used to hate that especially co-ordinate geometry, probability, time-distance-speed-what not problems. I used to be a poor scorer in the maths sections of every competitive exam that I attempted in my life and I attribute that to my love for calculus and a strong preference for a different branch of mathematics that always fascinated me. Maths that deals only with numbers, the beauty and magic of them, technically phrased as ‘number theory’ in mathematics.
And as a kid, when I used to break my head and solve maths puzzles, I came across this name in an article in ‘Young world’ (Hindu’s supplement for kids that’s published every Saturday). This person was a giant in the field of ‘number theory’ and was considered equivalent to Euler or Jacobi. I immediately fell in love with his story and immediately started my hunt for a good book about him as I wanted to know more about his life and soon found one. Many years passed before I could finally purchase that book on a sultry Sunday afternoon in the Bangalore book festival, last October.
Fast forward to the future…….Around 3 days back, while I was coming to office, I had a discussion with my colleague about magicians. No, we were not talking about those people who have this uncanny knack of pulling out pigeons from their hats or crunching a stick into a handkerchief. We were talking about these types of magicians:
“There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it.” – Hans Bethe
The above quote by Bethe was in tribute to a great person, Richard P. Feynman, better known to the world as an extraordinary physicist. However, this same quote was reused by us to discuss this person and in fact the provocation for this discussion was our common admiration for this person who was a magician of the highest caliber and the book that we read about him. The same book that I had purchased in the Bangalore book festival and happens to be the reason for this post today.
A book titled 'The man who knew infinity’ and the name of the person on whom this book is based - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
This book is a biography of India’s greatest mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan written by Robert Kanigel, who is professor of Science writing and director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robert Kanigel labels Ramanujan as a magician in the book. Simply because Ramanujan was not just a magician, he was something more than that. He was a person whose thinking of the highest order has baffled people from his time till date and perhaps will continue to do so. A person who used to barely make his ends meet somehow could think of theorems that were simply out of the world. It will be highly surprising to know that many of these theorems are now being widely used in subjects like particle physics, statistical mechanics, computer science, cryptology and space travel in the United States – subjects unheard of during Ramanujan’s time. And the best part is that a huge number of Ramanujan’s theorems are still being analyzed by present day mathematicians! In short, he was a person who strode the field of mathematical imagination like a colossus.
Robert Kanigel captures all these aspects and much more in a beautiful manner and presents an engrossing story of India’s greatest mathematician. Starting off from his birth in 1872, Kanigel narrates Ramanujan’s early influences, the early signs of his brilliance, his struggle for a measly clerk job, his endeavor to find a person who can understand his work, the now famous letter to Hardy (An eminent mathematician in England who discovered Ramanujan) starting off with ‘I beg to introduce myself…’, his collaboration with Hardy, his return to India and subsequent early demise at the young age of 32. All along the splendid narration, Kanigel strews tantalizing questions like ………………
‘Was his failure in school testimony to India’s failure to nurture its own? Would have achieved more had he found mentors early on? Would have become the next Gauss or Newton? Was his genius the product of sheer intellectual power, different only in degree from other brilliant mathematicians? Was Ramanujan’s life a tragedy of unfulfilled promise?.......’
Questions to which we can simply ponder and make us realize the extreme luck that Ramanujan had in making it big. The book also provoked me to think of several other related questions to which I have no answer. Has India left this process of discovery of future prodigies to sheer luck? And is that reason as to why we haven’t come across a single Ramanujan after the great man passed away in 1920? Have we successfully managed to throttle successive generations of budding mathematics talent with the result that there is not a single genius in maths that we could boast of after Ramanujan? Or am I expecting too much as a person like Ramanujan appears once in a 1000 years?
With my mind full of questions, I leave you with this brilliant end passage from the book, that’s a must read for any person who loves mathematics or for that matter any person who loves reading about great Indians.
‘In South India today, everyone has heard of Ramanujan. College professors and bicycle rickshaw drivers alike know his story, at least in sketchy outline, just as everyone in the West knows of Einstein. Few can say so much about his work, and yet something in the story of his struggle for the chance to pursue his work on his own terms compels the imagination, leaving Ramanujan a symbol for genius, for the obstacles it faces, for the burdens it bears, for the pleasure it takes in its own existence’
Before I start this post, let me confess something that will not exactly be relished by most of the readers of my blog. I love mathematics. It’s considered to be one of the most hated subjects by people all around the world but I just love it. No, not that kind of maths that stares at you openly from the question papers of competitive exams and delights in torturing you, making you barely cross the cut-offs in that section. I used to hate that especially co-ordinate geometry, probability, time-distance-speed-what not problems. I used to be a poor scorer in the maths sections of every competitive exam that I attempted in my life and I attribute that to my love for calculus and a strong preference for a different branch of mathematics that always fascinated me. Maths that deals only with numbers, the beauty and magic of them, technically phrased as ‘number theory’ in mathematics.
And as a kid, when I used to break my head and solve maths puzzles, I came across this name in an article in ‘Young world’ (Hindu’s supplement for kids that’s published every Saturday). This person was a giant in the field of ‘number theory’ and was considered equivalent to Euler or Jacobi. I immediately fell in love with his story and immediately started my hunt for a good book about him as I wanted to know more about his life and soon found one. Many years passed before I could finally purchase that book on a sultry Sunday afternoon in the Bangalore book festival, last October.
Fast forward to the future…….Around 3 days back, while I was coming to office, I had a discussion with my colleague about magicians. No, we were not talking about those people who have this uncanny knack of pulling out pigeons from their hats or crunching a stick into a handkerchief. We were talking about these types of magicians:
“There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it.” – Hans Bethe
The above quote by Bethe was in tribute to a great person, Richard P. Feynman, better known to the world as an extraordinary physicist. However, this same quote was reused by us to discuss this person and in fact the provocation for this discussion was our common admiration for this person who was a magician of the highest caliber and the book that we read about him. The same book that I had purchased in the Bangalore book festival and happens to be the reason for this post today.
A book titled 'The man who knew infinity’ and the name of the person on whom this book is based - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
This book is a biography of India’s greatest mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan written by Robert Kanigel, who is professor of Science writing and director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robert Kanigel labels Ramanujan as a magician in the book. Simply because Ramanujan was not just a magician, he was something more than that. He was a person whose thinking of the highest order has baffled people from his time till date and perhaps will continue to do so. A person who used to barely make his ends meet somehow could think of theorems that were simply out of the world. It will be highly surprising to know that many of these theorems are now being widely used in subjects like particle physics, statistical mechanics, computer science, cryptology and space travel in the United States – subjects unheard of during Ramanujan’s time. And the best part is that a huge number of Ramanujan’s theorems are still being analyzed by present day mathematicians! In short, he was a person who strode the field of mathematical imagination like a colossus.
Robert Kanigel captures all these aspects and much more in a beautiful manner and presents an engrossing story of India’s greatest mathematician. Starting off from his birth in 1872, Kanigel narrates Ramanujan’s early influences, the early signs of his brilliance, his struggle for a measly clerk job, his endeavor to find a person who can understand his work, the now famous letter to Hardy (An eminent mathematician in England who discovered Ramanujan) starting off with ‘I beg to introduce myself…’, his collaboration with Hardy, his return to India and subsequent early demise at the young age of 32. All along the splendid narration, Kanigel strews tantalizing questions like ………………
‘Was his failure in school testimony to India’s failure to nurture its own? Would have achieved more had he found mentors early on? Would have become the next Gauss or Newton? Was his genius the product of sheer intellectual power, different only in degree from other brilliant mathematicians? Was Ramanujan’s life a tragedy of unfulfilled promise?.......’
Questions to which we can simply ponder and make us realize the extreme luck that Ramanujan had in making it big. The book also provoked me to think of several other related questions to which I have no answer. Has India left this process of discovery of future prodigies to sheer luck? And is that reason as to why we haven’t come across a single Ramanujan after the great man passed away in 1920? Have we successfully managed to throttle successive generations of budding mathematics talent with the result that there is not a single genius in maths that we could boast of after Ramanujan? Or am I expecting too much as a person like Ramanujan appears once in a 1000 years?
With my mind full of questions, I leave you with this brilliant end passage from the book, that’s a must read for any person who loves mathematics or for that matter any person who loves reading about great Indians.
‘In South India today, everyone has heard of Ramanujan. College professors and bicycle rickshaw drivers alike know his story, at least in sketchy outline, just as everyone in the West knows of Einstein. Few can say so much about his work, and yet something in the story of his struggle for the chance to pursue his work on his own terms compels the imagination, leaving Ramanujan a symbol for genius, for the obstacles it faces, for the burdens it bears, for the pleasure it takes in its own existence’
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