Srinivasa Ramanujan and Lessons for Today's India

Today, April 26, 2020, marks the centennial death anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught math genius born into a poor family in Southern India in 1887 under British colonial rule, who conjured theorems and formulas in his short 32 years of life that continue to intrigue and challenge mathematicians to this day.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

The anniversary comes at a tragic time for India. Sectarian and police violence have claimed many lives, mostly Muslim, following the passing of a discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 aggressively promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indians of all faiths have been demonstrating against the law, although the coronavirus contagion has halted it for now. (But the pandemic has added its own macabre twist to the story. Reports are now emerging that right-wing fanatics are attacking and killing Indian Muslims for spreading the virus!) The original Citizenship Act of 1955 guaranteed citizenship to every Indian irrespective of religion, reflecting the aspirations of a secular, democratic nation. The amended bill favors all major religions of South Asia except Islam, a blatant discrimination against India’s 200-million Muslim community.

Remembering Ramanujan against today’s India offers lessons about the insidious ways by which bigotry and injustice can erode the soul of a nation and stifle the flowering of its geniuses.

Ramanujan would have withered away as a shipping clerk in Madras (now Chennai) had it not been for the patronage of an Englishman. In 1913, the same year that Rabindranath Tagore, another son of India, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ramanujan wrote a letter to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy to rescue him from oblivion. Trying to digest the 50 or so theorems included in the letter, Hardy realized he was dealing with a rare phenomenon. The mathematics seemed so sublime that Hardy was convinced “the results must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.”

Ramanujan's Letter to Hardy

G.H. Hardy

Hardy managed to bring Ramanujan to England through a grant, giving him an intellectual home at Cambridge where he flourished for five years, producing pioneering work in such branches as number theory and partition function that secured his reputation as among the greats of mathematics. The serendipitous discovery of Ramanujan’s “Lost Notebook” by Wisconsin University Mathematics professor George Andrew in 1976 that included calculations involving “mock theta functions,” 56 years after he worked them out in India, has added to the enigma and the otherworldly genius of Ramanujan. The late physicist Freeman Dyson (1923-2020) aptly summed up Ramanujan’s achievement: “That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover … I have intermittently been coming back to Ramanujan’s garden. Every time I come back, I find fresh flowers blooming.”

From Ramanujan's Notebooks

Ramanujan’s theorems are now applied in fields ranging from particle physics and statistics to cryptology and computer science. His approximation for pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, finds use in today’s fastest algorithms in computing the irrational number to trillion decimal places.

Ramanujan was lucky. (So was Tagore. Had not the Irish poet Yeats championed his work in the West, the Bengali poet would unlikely to have won the Nobel.) But for every Ramanujan who succeeded, how many Ramanujans must have died on the vine when the British ruled the Subcontinent for over a century? Colonial powers by their nature subjugate, exploit and massacre. But when the oppressors are one’s own leaders, what’s the excuse? Modi and his BJP passed the Citizenship Act to marginalize Muslims or drive them out of India. Such overt discrimination affects not only the target population but the entire nation, preventing potential Tagores and Ramanujans from ever seeing the light of day.

The human potential of India is incalculable. We get a sense of it by the disproportionate number of Indian American engineers and CEOs keeping hi-tech companies humming right here in Silicon Valley. Brain drain from India and other countries will continue so long as the West offers better opportunities to immigrants. While India cannot provide such opportunities for all, passing discriminatory laws against a segment of its population diminishes the nation and shackles its geniuses, be they Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Muslim. When a government becomes tyrannical, the creative vitality of its people seeps away as from cut flowers in a vase.