This is a transcript of Ramji Raghavan’s podcast: Learning from the Mavericks: A Tribute to Ramanujan.
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I first learnt about the self-taught mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan in Nehru’s Discovery of India. Less than a decade later, in 1987, Ramanujan invaded my thoughts again, in the form of a New York Times article, “An Isolated Genius Is Given His Due”. I felt proud as an Indian and also deeply touched by Ramanujan’s tragic and compelling life story snatched away so cruelly at the young age of thirty-two, almost as if it were conveying the romance of an unrealised promise.
Then PBS TV in America brought out a fascinating and absorbing documentary called “The Man Who Loved Numbers” through interviews with Cambridge dorms and Mrs Ramanujan in Madras. The film explored Ramanujan’s all too brief life and extraordinary contributions to mathematics. It ended on a rather wistful note. While Ramanujan’s chief collaborator Hardy would be remembered through a plaque in Trinity College, Cambridge, there was no plaque or any other form of remembrance or acknowledgement for Ramanujan, whom Hardy and Littlewood had ranked among the greatest mathematicians in history. Just imagine that.
In 1989 on a visit to Madras, now Chennai, over a cup of tea with my uncle, K Padmanabhan, I mentioned the PBS film on Ramanujan. To my great delight and marvellous surprise, my uncle offered to arrange a meeting for me with Mrs Ramanujan. After dinner that very same evening, I was led into Mrs Ramanujan’s modest home in Triplicane. A frail old woman, ninety years old, with bright liquid eyes and a sweet smile, hard of hearing, welcomed me. As we sat down, I couldn’t help but notice in that small and crowded space, a magnificent cast of Ramanujan I was told was made by an American sculptor and gifted by a group of international mathematicians. It was an arresting presence, almost as if Ramanujan was there. That his presence was shining through the bust and dominating the room, his deep penetrating eyes seemed to be staring into a faraway realm, almost privy to secret knowledge beyond the reach of us mere mortals.
Mrs Ramanujan spoke about her husband as if he had just passed away a few weeks ago. It was surreal. With tears in her eyes, she said, “for him, it was just numbers, numbers, and numbers.” Almost in wonder, rotating her fingers, she said in Tamil: Kanaka, Kanaka, Kanaka. Numbers, numbers and numbers. And then she added, rather sadly, no one remembers my husband anymore. No one comes to see me. Only you and a math teacher from England, of Indian origin, have visited me in the last eighteen months. I was overcome with a sense of sorrow.
As I stood up to leave, I presented her with a traditional gift of a saree and some fruit. I then leaned towards her and held her hand gently — I still remember the hand, the bluish-green veins on her light skin — and told her, “You should consider yourself lucky, very fortunate, for having had the opportunity to love and care for your husband — a man who will go down as being one of the greatest mathematicians in history and as one of the greatest Indian heroes.” A wonderful, almost grateful, smile lit up her face, almost like a young girl being complimented.
As I walked out of her house, her foster son led me to a shop on the sidewalk that was selling some fine looking watercolour paintings of Ramanujan. I bought a few of them — one of them showed a young Ramanujan in pigtails with a picture of the goddess Namigiri in the background, Another showed a young Ramanujan and even younger, almost playful, Janaki (his wife, or to-be wife) sitting in front of the sacred fire, reciting Vedic hymns at their wedding. As I walked towards my car that night, I couldn’t help but visualise in my mind’s eye a young man dying with a pen and notebook in hand, furiously writing rarified mathematical formulae. As Mrs Ramanujan had recalled so movingly, for Ramanujan, it was only numbers, numbers, and numbers. He lived and breathed numbers. He even felt pain, physical pain, in terms of numbers. Kanaka, Kanaka, Kanaka. Just think of the intense passion of that man. I wished I could do something to honour his name, but I was a banker based in New York, and I had no idea how I might memorialise Ramanujan. The idea came to me years later, when as head of the Agastya International Foundation, I thought it would be inspirational to have a bust of Ramanujan at the Agastya Campus in Andhra Pradesh which welcomes thousands of village children and government school teachers from across the country. We commissioned Jayprakash Shirgaonkar, a well-known Mumbai based sculptor, to make the bust from four extant pictures of Ramanujan, one of which had made it to the 1962 commemorative stand. A few months later, a youthful and handsome looking bronze bust, thirty-three inches high and weighing fifty kilos, arrived at the campus, where it was unveiled by 2006 Ramanujan prize winner, Sujatha Ramadurai, and members of the National Knowledge Commission in 2008.
And then, almost as if it were to set right the egregious oversight by Cambridge University, my father, KV Raghavan, a former trustee of Agastya, came up with the novel suggestion to gift Ramanjuan’s bust to Cambridge University. Sujatha spoke to her friend John Coates at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge, who responded with alacrity and said they would be delighted to have Ramanujan’s bust at Cambridge. Agastya also decided to gift busts of Ramanujan to three premier Indian educational institutions, namely IIT Madras, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and TIFR’s Centre for Applicable Mathematics, also in Bangalore. All three occasions attracted a number of visitors. Notable amongst them were Dr MS Swaminathan, who is the father of India’s Green Revolution, Mr Narayana Murthy, who is the founder of Infosys, Dr VK Aterai, or the former head of the DRDO, and Professor VS Ramamurthy, the then director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies.
In May 2010, my family and I had the pleasure of joining John Coates, Martin Hyland, Tadashi Tokieda, and Sally Lowe for lunch at John’s office in the Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Lunch was followed by a visit to the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, where we spent time admiring Ramanujan’s magnificent bust. Martin commented that Ramanujan’s eyes seemed to be gazing at some faraway realm. In John’s words, literally hundreds of students will pass the bust each morning, and it will be a constant reminder to the large student body in mathematics that comes from all over the world of the greatness of Indian mathematical thought.
In 2017, Sujatha Ramadurai, now a professor of mathematics and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, and her husband, Ram Ramadurai, very kindly offered to donate money to create the Ramanujan Math Park, or RMP, as it’s now called on the Agastya Campus. Designed by Sujatha and VSS Shastri, a maths communicator, and actively supported by Mahavir, Thiagarajan, and Ajith Basu from Agastya, the RMP occupies five thousand square meters and is supported by a grant from the State Bank of India Mutual Funds and HD Parekh Foundation.
It was inaugurated on December 22nd, Ramanujan’s birthday and India’s National Mathematics Day, in 2017. In 2018, a film of the Ramanujan Math Park was shown at the International Conference of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro by Sujatha and Tadashi Tokieda, who’s now at Stanford University.
And then, with support from Ravi Kailas, in 2020, a bust of Ramanujan was sent to MIT in Boston, a project after my own heart. The first time that Agastya had gifted Ramanujan’s bust to a premier American university. In 2020, again, the RMP’s platonic exhibits were ranked among the best mathematics exhibits from the top fifteen math museums in the world. A small and perhaps fitting tribute to Ramanujan.
Thousands of children and school teachers visit the RMP every year to experience the excitement and joy of learning mathematics hands-on. They get to see math in real life and in nature. Perhaps someday, one of them might shine like a brilliant star, as Ramanujan did and continues to do. When I do visit the RMP and stop to stare momentarily at his bust, I can’t help but remember my meeting with Mrs Ramanujan on that warm night so many years ago in Madras, now Chennai, and wonder what she might have said had she known that a math museum named after her great husband in a remote, rural area in India would one day find a place among the great math museums of the world.
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The Learning From The Mavericks podcast pays tribute to some of the world’s greatest leaders and innovators, allowing us to learn from their lives and experiences. Find this episode of the podcast here: Podcast | Learning from the Mavericks: A Tribute to Ramanujan
