My Search for Ramanujan
Page 11
Ramanujan was also elected to the London Mathematical Society. After that, the Fellows of Trinity College found it hard to say no the second time his name came up, and in October 1918, he was finally elected a Fellow of Trinity College. He had triumphed against prejudice and won the honors he so well deserved.
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Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_18
18. English Malaise
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
England’s unforgiving climate and Ramanujan’s poor diet took their toll. Ramanujan’s health continued its long decline. He had endured a variety of ailments throughout his life, and after five years in Cambridge, he was constantly ill. The doctors believed he had tuberculosis, although later findings have suggested a parasitic infection affecting his liver. Blood poisoning was also suspected. No one knew exactly what was amiss, but he suffered from fevers, stomach pains, and many other symptoms.
The treatment for tuberculosis was rigorous. Patients were purposely kept in unheated airy rooms, with only blankets to protect them from the elements. The idea was that the lungs could somehow be cleansed through fresh, cold air. In England, he had always suffered from the cold, and now he was to be exposed to cold on purpose. And food—always a concern—now seemed an insurmountable problem, since the institutional food was incompatible with Ramanujan’s pledge of maintaining a strict Hindu diet that had to be prepared under Brahmin oversight (namely his own). Ramanujan therefore insisted on doing his own cooking, and after his Indian friends who visited him lobbied the management of the sanatorium on his behalf, he was allowed to prepare his own meals.
Theories abound as to why he became so sick. Tuberculosis can be aggravated, even triggered, by a lack of vitamin D. In England, Ramanujan was always indoors and was therefore exposed to little sunshine, and his diet—mostly fruits and vegetables—did not supply much of that needed vitamin. The privations brought about by the war made things even worse. Moreover, his sedentary nocturnal life was in itself unhealthy. His condition, whatever was causing it, had become acute. He lost weight rapidly. He was in and out of hospital. Finally, even Hardy came to realize that to save his life, perhaps his protégé should return home to India, at least for a while.
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Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_19
19. Homecoming
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
In hospitals, sanatoriums, halfway houses, through declining health, Ramanujan kept up his work. He continued to produce groundbreaking theorems about partitions, identities, infinite series, integrals, and more, though now—in contrast to his work five years earlier—with a proof of every result. He had learned how to do mathematics in the modern style, in which every assertion must be demonstrated using rigorous argumentation.
Ramanujan’s health was declining slowly, and that allowed for a host of useless statements to be made about his condition: he is better today, or only slightly worse, or he is on the mend. At some point, Hardy felt that he was doing well enough for a sea voyage, and he suggested both to him and to the academic authorities in Madras, which had cosponsored his sojourn in England, that perhaps it was time for Ramanujan to return home—at least for a visit in hopes of further improving his health.
And the time was propitious. During the war, the German navy had blockaded all the sea routes to Britain in an effort to isolate it both from the Continent and from American aid, which came mostly by sea. With the war now over, sea travel was returning to normal, and it was again a matter of course to book passage to India. But Ramanujan did not express any great enthusiasm for the idea of a sea voyage home. In fact, he was rather cool to the proposal, which Hardy found perplexing. There were several possible reasons for Ramanujan’s reluctance.
By now, the young Brahmin had become used to living in England. He had found a way to maintain his diet: buying fresh vegetables wherever he could, cooking them—even in a hospital kitchen—and procuring what he couldn’t purchase from Indian friends in England who may have received packages of food from relatives back home and were willing to share them.
Another reason was that he had heard that if as a tuberculosis patient, he was being encouraged to go home, it was a sign that his disease had worsened beyond hope of cure, and he was being sent home to die among his loved ones. There was also a personal reason for his reluctance. He was alone, sick, depressed, and worried that for more than a year, he had not heard a word from Janaki. And for some months, he had heard little from his mother or father. Finally, there was a mathematical reason for his reluctance. Ramanujan was worried that in India, his torrent of mathematical productivity might recede.
For all these reasons, he was in no rush to go home. But it seems that he had little choice in the matter. Hardy was out to save his life and was in contact with Indian colleagues; that arrangements would be made for Ramanujan’s return to his homeland—nominally for a visit, now made possible by the end of the war—was a foregone conclusion.
In February 1919, Ramanujan obtained a new passport. The passport photo for which he sat has since become one of the best-known photographs of him. He had all the necessary documents, and passage home had already been booked for him.
Ramanujan’s passport photo
On March 13, 1919, Ramanujan paid his last visit to Hardy, left him many of his mathematical papers, and boarded the SS Nagoya, bound for Bombay. From there, he would make his way by train to Madras and Kumbakonam.
On April 6, Ramanujan was united with his family in Madras. He was showing symptoms of severe ill health, and he was placed under the care of a physician in a quiet house in the city. Everyone wanted to see him. There were numerous articles about him and his life in the newspapers—he was a celebrity. But he needed peace and quiet if he was to regain his health. It was ordered that the number of people he saw every day be limited and that he be given ample food and rest.
As summer approached, the doctors told Komalatammal that she should take her son to the high country, where it would be cooler and drier than in sweltering coastal Madras. She chose a town in the hills west of Kumbakonam, not far from the hometown that the family had never forsaken while moving around over south India. Money was no longer a problem, for Ramanujan received funding for all his activities, living expenses, and health care from a number of government agencies and other sources. He was one of the most famous people in India, and the biggest problem, other than his health, was to keep people away from him—it seemed that everyone on the subcontinent wanted to see the celebrated genius who had returned home.
Ramanujan spent the summer in a relatively cool environment, working on mathematics. It is hard to describe his health: there were ups and downs, but he was still treated as a tuberculosis patient. His wife would wash his legs and feet, clean the phlegm he would cough up—a sign of tuberculosis, although consistent with other possible ailments—and feed him the foods he had craved for five long years in England: yogurt, rice, pickles, and spicy curries and dal.
Late in the fall, Ramanujan and his entourage moved back to Madras, now that temperatures had dropped to more tolerable levels. By now, he had stopped cooperating with his doctors. He had become an exceptionally willful and feisty patient, frustrating all who tried to take care of him. It is unclear whether he had lost faith in his physicians or simply wanted to be left alone after being shuttled between hospitals and sanatoriums, first in England and now in India. Or perhaps he was now at peace with whatever fate would bring him.
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Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_20
20. The Tragic End
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
As Ramanujan approached the end of his life, he was surrounded by domestic strife. His wife and mother were constantly arguing with each other over even the most trivial matters. Anything would send one of them, usually the mother, into a tirade against the other. But Janaki was now twenty years old and no longer a child. She had her husband at her side, who would often support her against the unreasonableness of his mother. Ramanujan’s maternal grandmother had also joined the household, and she would frequently add her two cents to the domestic arguments. It was not an environment conducive to healing.
Ramanujan would often tell his doctor that he had lost the will to live. There were too many factors wearing him down: his illness, the constant domestic strife, and the self-imposed drive to work on mathematics, especially the new mock theta functions. He was slowly withering away.
Early in the morning of April 26, 1920, he fell into a coma, in which he remained for two hours while Janaki tried to revive him by feeding him milk. He died toward midday.
All of India mourned its national hero, Ramanujan, a man who had brought so much honor and pride to a nation still in the chains of colonial rule. He had triumphed against all odds, he had made a name for himself in England and throughout the world, and he had left a mathematical legacy that would keep me and other mathematicians hard at work over many decades, trying to understand and generalize his results.
After Ramanujan’s death, his notebooks and other papers were widely dispersed. George Andrews discovered Ramanujan’s so-called lost notebook, forgotten in the Trinity College library, when he visited there in 1976. He spent many years studying it, as did I and other mathematicians. Others of Ramanujan’s papers are still being studied, and it will be many years before we understand all that he knew and worked on. Sifting through Ramanujan’s work continually turns up nuggets of mathematical gold. The work continues.
Janaki Ammal lived another seventy-four years, until her death in 1994. She adopted two boys, brothers whose parents, who lived very close to Janaki, had died within a two-year period. One of them, W. Narayanan, became a banker, and he remained very close to his adopted mother all of their lives, taking care of her in her old age. Late in life, she would also enjoy financial help from the Indian government—something that had not been forthcoming in the years following her husband’s death.
It seems that Ramanujan’s mother had taken some of her son’s papers and sold them to universities and institutions and that Janaki had received nothing. For many years, she received only a very modest income from her husband’s pension. All the rest had gone to his parents. Those who could attempted to exploit Ramanujan’s fame for their own benefit. For example, Ramanujan’s brother wrote to Hardy asking for money to support his education. It is unfortunate that so little went to Janaki.
Janaki asked very little for herself. In her old age, she simply wanted the broken promise of a statue in Ramanujan’s honor fulfilled. Where others had failed, the mathematicians of the world came through, and I am proud that my father was one of the many who helped provide the gift of a bust of Ramanujan. Janaki’s touching letter to my father thanking him for his contribution will always remind me of her love for her husband.
Part III
My Life Adrift
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_21
21. I Believe in Santa
Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2
(1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
(2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Montreal (1984–1985)
My parents dropped me off at Baltimore’s Penn Station, and I was now standing alone on the platform waiting for the Amtrak train to New York, where I would change for the “Adirondack” to Montreal. I had my backpack, my Peugeot bicycle, and my large suitcase. My parents were on their way home, and there was no turning back. Like Ramanujan, who ran away to Vizagapatnam after he flunked out of college, I was running away having dropped out of high school. Of course, we had different reasons for running. Ashamed of having lost his scholarship, Ramanujan had simply disappeared. I was fleeing my pressure cooker of a life, but I had left with my parents’ knowledge and consent.
It takes over fourteen hours to travel by rail from Baltimore to Montreal, and I passed the time contemplating my past and my future. The metronomic rumble of the wheels as they clicked and clacked over the steel tracks somehow nourished my deflated ego. “Go forth, go forth, go forth,” they seemed to say. “Have hope, have hope, have hope.” I told myself that I was setting out to live a life that was true to myself, that I was the master of my destiny, and soon my somber mood was replaced by optimism and excitement. I thought about my friends, and I wondered whether I would ever see any of them again. By the time the train pulled into New York, I was thinking about what it would be like to live in a French-speaking city. Would the radio stations play the songs I knew? What would it be like to ride the metro? Whom might I meet? Would I make friends? I had no idea what the future might bring, and I was oddly excited by that uncertainty.
Now, Montreal was not a random choice of destination, and there was one certainty that comforted me: my brother Santa would be waiting for me on the platform in Montreal. Santa had somehow managed to escape the formula that my parents had laid out for him. Perhaps because they had such relatively low expectations of him, he had been granted greater scope in finding his own way. After earning his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Chicago, Santa immediately began to work toward a doctorate in biochemistry and immunology in Montreal, at McGill University. My parents had mapped out for him a career in industry or business, and so we were all surprised when he decided to pursue a career in academia. As it turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly to those readers with more liberal ideas of childrearing, Santa at twenty had a better idea of his strengths and interests than his parents had had for him when he was six. Santa would go on to hold faculty positions at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University College London, and Emory University, and he is now the president of the University of Cincinnati.
Five years apart in age, we had never really been close, and so I was touched by his offer to look after me, and I was looking forward to living with him. But it turned out that Santa had other plans. To my surprise, he had arranged a room for me at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, on Rue Stanley, in downtown Montreal. I was totally unprepared for so much independence. As the sixteen-year-old son of tiger parents, I had experienced only a very narrow swath of life outside of home and school. I had little or no practical skills or street smarts. I was also unprepared for looking after myself. I had never even had my hair cut by anyone other than my mother.
But I moved in, stowed my bike, put away my things, made my bed, and managed to get through the first night without becoming completely unnerved. But the next morning, when I opened the door of the common bathroom, I was confron
ted with the sight of an unbelievably hairy young man’s back. He was enormous. Wearing nothing but a Budweiser bath towel wrapped around his capacious waist, he was holding a Walkman in his left hand while brushing his teeth with his right. His head was bobbing to the beat of whatever was blasting from his headphones. Sensing that he was no longer alone—perhaps he saw me in the mirror—he turned in a flash, revealing a pair of gold aviator sunglasses. At the sight of me, he yelled, I suppose in order to be heard over whatever music was pounding into his head, “Kid! Cool, man! Give me five!” He turned out to be a football player on McGill University’s club team. Nice guy, I suppose, but he scared the hell out of me.
I lived in the frat house for a few days, cowering in my room, wondering what sort of “Animal House” I had gotten myself into.
Santa responded with good grace to my terror by offering me the sofa in his one-bedroom apartment. Santa, of course, knew all about my insecurities, and all about the voices in my head that continually spoke to me of my inadequacy. We had, after all, grown up in the same tiger cage, and he understood me completely. He told me that he heard the same voices. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had someone in whom I could confide, someone who understood my inner turmoil and could offer the loving and nurturing care that I so sorely needed.