The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Achievement in the Face of Adversity

From his earliest days, Ramanujan’s life was a confrontation with adversity. When he was very young, he developed smallpox, a dangerous and oftentimes fatal virus that killed thousands of Indians each time there was an outbreak. In fact, Ramanujan was something of a success story by the time he was a toddler, since “three or four in every ten children died before they’d lived a year” (12). The devastation caused by disease struck his own family, though he survived. By the time he was six years old, Ramanujan had lost three siblings to disease (12). Right from his earliest days, his life was an embodiment of overcoming adversity.

Kanigel devotes an entire section of Chapter 2 to the influence George Carr’s book A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics had on Ramanujan. While the book had a very positive impact on Ramanujan’s development as a mathematician, this development came at the expense of broader intellectual growth. The deeper Ramanujan went into his obsession with math, the more “he lost interest in everything else” (46). This led to one of the first significant failures in his life: he lost his scholarship at Government College and had to drop out. A similar series of events happened a short time later, when he attended Pachaiyappa College. These back-to-back failures made his ascendency as a mathematical genius very tricky. In spite of his rising reputation, the limitations imposed by his lack of a college degree, and his history of not completing the programs, presented significant adversity and challenge in his life. In some ways, his self-will bordered on stubbornness. Kanigel says of the system that placed such a high importance on degree acquisition that “it wouldn’t budge” (55)—and neither would Ramanujan. In spite of the hurdles that lacking a college degree would have for entrance into professional life, Ramanujan did not relinquish his ambitions and the belief that he had in his own mathematical abilities. Eventually, he made a connection to G. H. Hardy and moved to England to become a full-time, practicing mathematician. The setbacks at the two colleges in India were emotionally significant: After the first, Ramanujan disappeared for days because he was embarrassed. However, he ultimately persevered.

The difficult conditions of his childhood, coupled with the early tastes of failure, provided tests against which Ramanujan strengthened his resolve. When he moved to England to work alongside one of the prominent mathematician G. H. Hardy, the adversity Ramanujan faced was monumental. The culture shock alone would have been enough to stymie a person of lesser resolve. In addition to the culture gap were the ever-deteriorating conditions of general life in Europe brought about by World War I. Still, Ramanujan kept on with his work. After two years at Trinity, Ramanujan became ill with tuberculosis. While the sickness made his life miserable, he kept at his work. In fact, some of Ramanujan’s most impressive work was done while he was suffering from the effects of tuberculosis. Eventually, after Ramanujan had moved back home in 1919, his sickness became too severe and he finally succumbed to it. However, his life in many ways is a study of how to persevere in the face of tremendous adversity. One of his more significant achievements was induction into the Royal Society, a feat made even more impressive considering how much he had to overcome to get there.

Religion Versus Reason

The exploration of this apparent binary is embodied in the book by Ramanujan and Hardy, the former a believer and the latter an atheist. In Chapter 1, Kanigel lays the foundation for Ramanujan’s religious worldview and also debunks sentiments expressed by peers at the time to the contrary. In blunt terms, Kanigel says “they were wrong” when discussing how “some of his Western friends […] would say that Ramanujan was not really religious” (30). He attributes this to a misunderstanding of Ramanujan’s complex personality. Kanigel says that “beside the reasoned, rational side of Ramanujan lay an intuitive, even irrational streak that most of his Western friends later could never understand” (27). Ramanujan ultimately believed that his mathematical gifts were gifts from god, even though his life’s work was based on the use of reason. Kanigel says that, according to Ramanujan, “it was goddess Namagiri […] to whom he owed his mathematical gifts” (36). Prior to arriving at Cambridge, Ramanujan often tried to prove the ties between mathematics and the existence of god. Kanigel provides one specific anecdote in which Ramanujan showed up at the house of one of his teachers and expounded on “the ties he saw between god, zero, and infinity” (31). Though Kanigel concedes that Ramanujan may have veered closer to a secular worldview later in life, he “never did rebel” against the spiritualism under which he grew up and that he embraced as a young man in India.

Unlike Ramanujan, who was able to have one foot in the rational world and one in the irrational and mystical world, Hardy was a devout atheist. He even went so far as to claim that “god […] was his personal enemy” (110). While “Hardy agreed with Hadamard that ‘unconscious activity often plays a part in discovery,’” he was not willing to attribute any of this process to divine origin. For Hardy, there was surely a scientific explanation for intuition’s source, and he took the position that “it was better to meekly sidestep the issue than mire our explanations in foolishness” (285). His work was purely and entirely an intellectual pursuit. He did not accept the view that the unexplainable was, by default, of divine origin, whereas Ramanujan not only accepted it but insisted upon it. The men’s differing outlooks on religion would seem to set up a clash of personalities. However, that did not happen. These two men from wildly different backgrounds and with immensely different views on the nature and existence of god ultimately collaborated to produce some of the most significant mathematical work of the 20th century. Their collaboration shows a fusion rather than a binary and suggests that the search for objective truth is not the sole domain of science or religion; instead, it is shared.

Culture Shock

Ramanujan arrived in England in 1914, a time before the global connectivity that people have access to today. In fact, it took Ramanujan a few days short of a full month to make the trip from India to England. His emigration to England was a total immersion into a wildly different culture than his own. Like many Indians at the time, Ramanujan had regular interactions with English people, as India was still a colony of England during his lifetime. This fact afforded him some preconceived notions as to what to expect from the people in England. However, everything from the food to the climate was different. Kanigel shares an anecdote early in the book in which Ramanujan had to be taught how to use a blanket.

Ramanujan, as part of his devotion to Brahminism, was a strict vegetarian. One of his primary concerns while considering the offer to move to England in the first place involved whether or not he would be able to maintain this practice. After he arrived in England, Kanigel tells a story in which a fellow Indian told Ramanujan that his fried potatoes had been cooked in animal lard. According to Kanigel, “whether true or not, Ramanujan never ordered anything from the college kitchen again” (240). Instead, he learned how to cook for himself, an act that he never had to undertake until moving to England. The difference in food tastes between India and England was a near constant source of misery for Ramanujan. While he would have some moderate success in finding Indian food, or having it sent from India, most of the time, he was left with very few options as to what he could eat.

Additionally, the English climate was something that Ramanujan had never experienced, particularly the damp kind of cold pervasive in England in certain seasons. While Ramanujan was not the only Indian attending Trinity at the time, he was still an outsider. He knew this and often felt it. The English character was different from Indians’, notably in what Kanigel calls their “reserve,” making them hard to figure out. All of this created a growing sense of isolation for Ramanujan. Kanigel points out that “Ramanujan’s apartment could feel like a prison” (245), and this heightened sense of imprisonment only increased when Ramanujan was sent to a nursing home as part of his treatment for tuberculosis. According to Kanigel, “Ramanujan was not the kind of chameleon-like figure who does well at the tough job of reshaping himself to fit a foreign culture” (244), and this fact likely perpetuated his sense of loneliness and isolation. While his work with Hardy allowed him a respite from the isolation, he never felt wholly comfortable for most of his time at Cambridge.