With the knowledge of numbers flowing from his incredible mind, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan is ingrained into Madras’ ethos. On August 3, Rajith Nair, the cofounder of Traveling Gecko hosted a walk titled Srinivasa Ramanujan and Madras, chronicling the relationship between the mathematician and the city. “Srinivasa Ramanujan is an inspirational figure. He struggled through poverty, he had troubles with his education, lived in an inhospitable climate and survived World War I.
Despite all of that, he managed to achieve a lot,” said Nair. He explained that Ramanujan’s inspiration came from one of the guests staying at his house. As his family was poor, his mother, Komalatammal, ran boarding facilities from her home. Some of the students studying in nearby colleges gifted Ramanujan, who was already teaching Mathematics to his classmates, three years his senior at the time, a book. “They gave him a copy of GS Carr, A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics. This book contained 5,000 mathematical equations, summarised. This is being used by IIT and JEE students now. He studied and proved some of the equations,” he said. One of the places that affected Ramanujan’s life greatly was the University of Madras.
He got a scholarship from the University of Madras because of recommendations from Indian and British professionals of Madras, at that time, and also through a letter from GH Hardy, to whom Ramanujan had previously written to. “In his journey, he had a lot of support from family and friends. Ramaswamy Aiyer, founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, as well as Sir Francis Spring, Chairman of the Madras Port Trust, were so impressed by his work that they helped him get the necessary connections to meet GH Hardy,” said Nair. In 1914, he was sent to Cambridge to study under English mathematician GH Hardy. “Hardy’s contribution to Ramanujan’s life is incomparable. The two would have tiffs like a couple. Hardy always looked out for Ramanujan. While Hardy wanted to do things in the proper mathematical way, Ramanujan remained unconventional to the rules. While Hardy was upset, he didn’t want to stifle Ramanujan’s creative genius,” said Nair.
The walk moved to the Ramanujan Museum and Math Education Centre located in Royapuram. Established in 2004, the museum had several letters and photographs from Ramanujan’s life. This was where Nair explained that Ramanujan spent a lot of time in Cambridge during the World War. “While he wrote to his mother and said that he was fine, in actuality, the Cambridge campus was being used as a hospital. Professors and students enlisted for the war.
The college initially had 700 students, which was then reduced to 150 after the war. Thus all the resources of the college were not available to Ramanujan during the war,” he said. Despite all this, Ramanujan was able to create theorems and formulae that are still in use today. Nair explained that his theorems are used to make better blast furnaces, improve on plastic and in the study of cancer. Additionally, in 2002, a Dutch mathematician discovered a concept called mock theta functions, which Ramanujan had discovered nearly 80 years ago.