09/01/2019

Ramanujan was a mathematician inspired by the gods.

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) is one of the most interesting figures in the history of mathematics, perhaps in all of science. Despite having a very deficient formal education, he possessed an extraordinary talent for discovering mysterious relationships between different numbers, expressed in extremely complicated formulas that no one had suspected before.

Ramanujan could almost never explain how he arrived at them and attributed his intuitions to the divine inspiration of the goddess Mahalakshmi, protector of his family. Divine, but not infallible: some (few) of his formulas were wrong! Others would only be proven much later by the work of other mathematicians, especially the Frenchman Pierre Deligne, who won the Fields Medal in 1978—in part, for having proven the so-called Ramanujan Conjecture.

The Indian belongs to the small club of mathematicians whose lives, for better or worse, have been portrayed in films. The most recent (2015), titled "The Man Who Knew Infinity," is quite faithful to the facts for a work of this genre.

Ramanujan was born in the Madras region (now Chennai), in southern India. His family belonged to the Brahmin caste, the highest in Hindu society, but they were poor, and he lost his father early. At the age of 16, he discovered a passion for mathematics, which became his almost exclusive interest. He wrote down his discoveries in a worn notebook, which he carried with him at all times.

His neglect of other subjects led to him failing more than once. Later, already married, he was forced to accept a humble job. At the age of 23, encouraged by his employers, he compiled his best results into a letter to the renowned English mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877–1947) of Cambridge University.

Impressed, Hardy invited him to visit England, where he strove to have his genius recognized, overcoming prejudices. But the English climate, combined with nutritional deficiencies, worsened Ramanujan's fragile health. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he returned to India, where he died shortly afterwards, at the age of 32.

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website or check the print version.

Folha allows each reader access to ten articles per month even without a subscription.