I prefer my novels as fables and my biographies straight. In particular, he dramatically embellishes Hardy’s (closeted?) homosexuality. While Leavitt captures much beautifully, as a novelist, he takes some sizeable liberties. In 2008 David Leavitt published a novelised version of Ramanujan’s life entitled the Indian Clerk. Highlights at the conference included the Nobel prize winning astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who described how important Ramanujan’s success in England had been to the self-confidence of himself and the founders of modern India including Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first prime minister of independent India in 1947. We had become experts on and had extended Ramanujan’s work on Pi. In 1987 I was fortunate enough to speak with my brother at the major centennial conference on Ramanujan, held at the University of Illinois. A kind stranger had put the franked stamps on the back. In 1962 on the 75th anniversary of Ramanujan’s birth the envelope (below) arrived at my parents’ house. In our house “the bible” referred to Hardy’s masterpiece Divergent Series.
My father David was a student of one of Hardy’s students. Ramanujan has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. In either case our version of Ramanujan would not exist. Swaminathan went on to say that had Ramanujan been born ten years later, he would have probably received a more robust and more ordinary education. He commented that had Ramanujan been born ten years early he would have been unable to receive the education and financial assistance that made his pre-Cambridge work possible. It comprises thousands of printed pages.Īn old Indian friend, Swami Swaminathan, oversaw the Ramanujan Library in Madras over half a century ago.
Fleshing out his Notebooks has only recently been completed principally by American mathematicians Prof Bruce Berndt and Prof George Andrews. The lost notebook initiated the study of mock theta functions which are only now being fully understood. He was especially expert in a part of number theory called modular forms which is of even more interest today than when he died. While he rarely proved his results he left a host of evaluations of sums and integrals. Ramanujan had an extraordinary ability to see patterns. While in England Ramanujan became the first Indian Fellow both of Trinity and of the Royal Society. It was lost and later found in the Wren library of the leading college for mathematics of the leading University in England. The work he did after returning to India in 1919 is contained in the misleadingly named Lost Notebook.
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