CHENNAI: One of the most prized possessions of the old Madras University library — a set of three handwritten notebooks of mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan — will be digitised and given to a few other libraries to preserve them for posterity and make them accessible to more researchers.
Mathematicians from around the world have, till date, been visiting the Chepauk campus library to go through the treasure trove of formulae and equations written down by Ramanujan, who was a research scholar, sponsored by the Board of Studies in Mathematics, at the university.
Mathematicians believe that the three manuscripts and a fourth one acquired by Prof G A Andrews from a library in England make a full compilation of Ramanujan’s contribution to the field of mathematics.
Scholars of advanced mathematics rate the work, titled Manuscript Book of Srinivasa Ramanujan, as “contemporary mathematics”. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research created a facsimile edition of the book in 1957 and made two volumes of Ramanujan’s writings. The original manuscripts have also been laminated, though the writing has faded in some places.
Since the manuscripts face the risk of fraying with time, the university, together with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Roja Muthiah Library, has decided to microfilm them.
“Five copies will be made of the microfilm, which will be distributed to the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Connemara Library, the Roja Muthiah Library and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, apart from one copy for the university itself,” vice-chancellor G Thiruvasagam said.
“We are still trying to understand some of the works done in that book. The kind of math in these notebooks is contemporary. They talk about modular forms, partition functions, approximation to pie, etc. It will be a challenge to decipher them all,” said R Balasubramanian, director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Curiously, though the manuscripts have been in the possession of the library for a long time, there are no records of their acquisition. “All books are registered in what is called an accession register at the library. However, these manuscripts are not mentioned there,” an assistant librarian, Ganesan, revealed.
“Our estimate is that the founder of library sciences, S R Ranganathan, who invented the Colon Classification for libraries and was among the foremost librarians in our university, acquired these books from Ramanujan directly, roughly between 1917 and 1920 - a few years before Ramanjuan died. Ranganathan was a mathematician himself,” says Ganesan, who has been with the library for over 30 years.
Ramanujan, while in India, is said to have recorded his results in notebooks without any derivations. This probably led a misperception that he was unable to prove his results and simply thought up the final result.
However, mathematician Bruce C Berndt, in his review of these notebooks and Ramanujan’s other works, has said the mathematical genius was capable of giving proofs of his results, but chose not to do so. Since paper was very expensive back then, Ramanujan used to do most of his work on slate and then transfer the results to paper, Berndt revealed.