Srinivasa Ramanujan The Man and The Genius - By Deepak Goyal “The mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the °Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, that has survived countless humanitarian arguments...° Was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.” So said his contemporary E.H. Neville. Deepak Goyal presents a profile.Imagine an impoverished twenty- something clerk. His formal credentials were even less than modest. To put it bluntly, he had twice flunked the F.A. exam roughly equivalent to the U.S. high school diploma.His poverty was grinding, and he was not always in good health. Hardly a resume to impress, but this man, who lived only till he was 32, went on to Cambridge and left a legacy in mathematics that is recognized today internationally as a lasting contribution.Srinivasa Ramanujan’s contribution transcends mathematics. He presented an inspiration for his nation, then still ruled by the British, by proving by example that Indians were the intellectual equal of the West.“Ramanujan’s career, just because he was a mathematician, is of unique importance to the development of relations between India and England,” according to his contemporary mathematician E.H. Neville, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.“India has produced great scientists, but (J.C.) Bose and (C.V.) Raman were educated outside India, and no one can say how much of their inspiration was derived from the great laboratories in which their formative years were spent and from the famous men who taught them.“India has produced great poets and philosophers, but there is a subtle tinge of patronage in all commendation in alien literature.“Only in mathematics are the standards unassailable, and therefore of all Indians, Ramanujan was the first whom the English knew to be innately equal of their greatest men.“The mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, the offensive assumption that has survived countless humanitarian arguments and political appeals and poisoned countless approaches between England and India, was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.”Born in December 1887 in the Tamil Nadu town of Erode, Ramanujan showed his precocious insights early on as a schoolboy.In an arithmetic class, a teacher said: “If three bananas are given to three boys, each boy would get a banana.” The teacher generalized this idea. Then Ramanujan asked: “Sir, if no banana is distributed to no student, would everybody still get a banana?”In his schooldays he was passionately involved with numbers, devising magic squares, and by the eighth grade he had mastered Loney’s Trigonometry, a standard undergraduate text.When he was 16, he got hold of a book of pure mathematics, G.S. Carr’s A Synopsis of Elementary Results.He passed the matriculation exam – equivalent to 10th grade – in 1904. Although he joined the Madras Govt. Arts College for its two-year pre-university F.A. program, his passion
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:31:59 +0000
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