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Srinivasa Ramanujan: A True Genius
| Article
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15919 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1997 |
3,188 Words |
| Author
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T.R. (Joe) Sundaram
T.R. (Joe) Sundaram owns and operates an engineering research
firm in Columbia, Maryland. He has published widely in both
scientific journals and popular magazines. |
In late January 1913, the English mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy, already world famous at age 36 and a fellow at Cambridge University's Trinity College, received a thick envelope postmarked Madras, India. Inside were several sheets of paper filled with impressive-looking mathematical formulas, all simply stated and without any supporting arguments or proof. The cover letter began:
"Dear Sir,"
"I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras. ... I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling."
Years later Hardy would ask an audience at Harvard University to imagine "the immediate reaction of an ordinary professional mathematician who receives a letter like this from an unknown Hindu clerk."
Hardy tossed the envelope aside and tried to go about his daily routine, but those pages of equations kept gnawing at his mind. Was the letter genuine, or was it an elaborate hoax? To help him answer that question, Hardy enlisted the help of his Cambridge colleague and collaborator in mathematics, John Edensor Littlewood. That night after dinner, the two began a detailed examination of the theorems of the unknown clerk from India. By midnight they had reached their conclusion: The man who had written those equations was truly a genius.
While some of the equations on the sheets looked familiar, others were quite unrecognizable, even to expert mathematicians of the caliber of Hardy and Littlewood. Some of the equations "defeated me completely," Hardy was to write years later.
To his considerable credit, once Hardy reached his conclusions, all his previous doubts vanished. He promptly went into action, doing everything in his power to bring this "unknown Hindu clerk" to Cambridge and to secure him the recognition that he richly deserved.
The origins
The man who wrote the letter to Hardy was Srinivasa Ramanujan. He had grown up in Kumbakonam in South India, a fair-sized city and commercial center, having been born on December 22, 1887, at Erode, a smaller nearby town. Kumbakonam was an ancient city. It had once been an imperial
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