Geography is Destiny: The instructive story of Srinivasa Ramanujan
More than a century ago, on 26 April 1920, one of India’s most notable mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan breathed his last in his ancestral village of Kumbakonam, then in Madras Presidency. He was 32 and what he had left behind is a fledgling cottage industry of maths savants whose greatest thrills in life come from cracking another of Ramanujan’s theorems for which the humble genius didn’t bother to leave a proof. Notwithstanding the almost incomprehensible nature of his work, which often borderlines mysticism, this self-taught, perennially sickly young man would have been lost to history but for the timely discovery by the two British mathematicians G.H. Hardy and J.E. Littlewood who invited him to Cambridge University under great financial and social hardships. What were the chances that we would have ever heard to Ramanujan who flunked collage on two occasions, was working as a lowly clerk in the accounts section of the Madras Port Trust Office and earned barely enough to secure himself a decent meal? It brings to bearing the question: How much of an importance does location really play? A lot — it seems. Let’s delve deeper.
In this hyper-connected, always-on world it’s often argued that geography is history, for opportunities seem to be galore and boundaries are but mental. But if anything, the story of science, technology and innovation only reinforces the fact that geography is destiny. Since foregone are seldom foregone and there is a deep path dependency, certain locations enjoy a disproportionate advantage over others. And there is hardly another institution that has dominated the science and technology milieu for the longest time as the Cambridge University. Founded in 1209, the university counts in its alumnus the likes of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, David Attenborough, John Maynard Keynes, and Robert Oppenheimer, among other influencers.
So, when Ramanujan landed at the Trinity College at Cambridge University in the Spring of 1914, he was already standing on the shoulders of giants. But before we decipher how this god-fearing, strictly vegetarian, socially awkward fellow managed to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and, in 1918, the first Indian to be appointed as a Fellow of Trinity College, we need to rewind to his rather forgetful days in South India. And please bear in mind that his stay at Cambridge (1914–1919) coincided with the First World War, where not only that the food was strictly rationed, but also most of the deserted university campus was converted into a make-shift hospital. To add to these, the incessant health problems that plagued the young mathematician who braved the high seas, much to the chagrin of his family and against his religious beliefs, to pursue his only life’s passion — mathematics.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, in present-day Tamil Nadu on 22 December 1887. With his father being a clerk in a sari shop and his mother a housewife, young Ramanujan didn’t have much of an inspiration going around. Most of his interest in pure mathematics was self-cultivated, consequently Ramanujan adopted his own notations, much to the frustration of western scholars and his contemporaries (of which there were not many). One of the early imprints on Ramanujan’s mind was from G.S. Carr’s book A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, where the author presented hundreds of mathematical formulae and theorems with little to no commentary or motivation. No soon, Ramanujan busied himself in proving those theorems and presenting his own, using his slate, chalk and divine intervention. Between 1903 and 1914, Ramanujan penned down about 4000 mathematical theorems, mostly without any formal proofs, organised into his four notebooks. His work on number theory, infinite series, mathematical analysis, and continued fractions has influenced numerous fields like computer science, cryptography, physics, and engineering.
Ramanujan’s singular focus on mathematics costed him a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam in 1904, and later a failure to secure a graduation from Pachaiyappa’s College, Madras. The next few years marked abject poverty, ill health, and social isolation for Ramanujan, where he would take mathematics tuitions and help others with homework to secure a decent meal. Yet he continued pouring all his energies into mathematics. Consequently, in 1911, his first paper, titled ‘Some Properties of Bernoulli’s Numbers,’ appeared in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. With some recommendations, in 1912 he secured a job as Class III, Grade IV clerk in the Accounts Section of the Madras Port Trust.
Seeing his research proclivity, the authorities at the Port Trust encouraged Ramanujan to write to serious mathematicians in the UK, which he did, but to discouraging responses from the likes of M.J.M. Hill from University College London and E.W. Hobson and H.F. Baker of Cambridge University. And then the famous letter of January 1913 to Godfrey Harold Hardy, one of Britain’s foremost pure mathematicians, where Ramanujan presented his intent, crammed with dozens of intricate formulae and theorems. The sheer appearance of the multi-page letter, written in abject informality, led Hardy to instantly dismiss everything as the work of a fraud or a crank. But upon subsequent follow-up, Hardy noted, “A single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.” Hence, started one of the most productive collaborations in the field of mathematics- Hardy-Ramanujan, which in a very short time, offered incredible dimensions to the field. At Cambridge, Ramanujan published 21 research papers, six in collaboration with Hardy.
One could wonder about the prospects of Ramanujan but for Hardy and the ecosystem at Cambridge. Hardy’s efforts in shaping young Ramanujan’s thinking could be gauged from the statement: “The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations, and theorems of complex multiplication, to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was, on the formal side at any rate, beyond that of any mathematician in the world … It was impossible to ask such a man to submit to systematic instruction, to try to learn mathematics from the beginning once more.” On the part of Ramanujan, he would maintain, “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it expresses a thought of God.”
Suffice it to say that it takes a fertile land and some trained hand to bring about a plant, regardless of the quality of seed. Such role, in the absence of formal institutions could be assumed by individuals, in the absence of individuals by serendipity, and in the absence of serendipity by divinity. We can only wonder how many such Ramanujans toil amid the dark allays of rural India not even aware of their own genius and their work’s potential. A humbling reminder that your geography could well be your destiny.