by Ken Ono
I couldn’t believe my luck. History seemed poised to repeat itself. The planets were in alignment, and good fortune was headed my way. I made plans to take full advantage of the opportunities. I would attend the conference and there make a name for myself, impressing both Berndt and the math faculty at the University of Montana.
Another and much larger meeting was scheduled four weeks after the Missoula meeting: the Rademacher Centenary Conference at Penn State. George Andrews, the celebrated Ramanujan scholar whom I first saw on TV at my frat house in 1988, was one of conference organizers. He had earned his PhD under Hans Rademacher, a mathematician whose fame was rooted in work that perfected one of Ramanujan’s most important theorems. Andrews was one of the organizers of this conference to honor the centenary of his advisor’s birth. Both Andrews and Berndt would be there, and Gordon also was among the invited speakers.
Together with Gordon, I hatched a plan: I would submit abstracts to both conferences proposing short contributed talks. I would also write some of the UM math faculty and offer to give a seminar before the MAA meeting in Missoula. I had a place to stay, the comfort of Erika’s childhood home. Gordon believed in me, and he assured me that I was ready for both meetings.
I asked Doug Bowman, one of Gordon’s other PhD students, to accompany me to Missoula. The promise of a road trip to Montana convinced Doug to attend the meeting with me.
Like Ramanujan, Doug was a self-trained mathematician who recorded his findings in notebooks. He studied a subject called q-series, which happened to be one of Ramanujan’s areas of expertise. Doug had been publishing papers for years, and as a result, he was attending UCLA on a prestigious graduate fellowship awarded by the National Science Foundation.
Doug and I submitted our abstracts to the MAA meeting, and we were delighted when they were both accepted. Through a family friend, I was introduced by email to Professor George McRae, one of the senior professors in the UM Department of Mathematics. He invited me to give a departmental seminar before the scheduled meeting. More precisely, he kindly acceded to my offer to present a seminar. My plan seemed to be working. I would get to meet the famous Professor Berndt, and I would have an opportunity to impress the UM faculty. All I had to do was deliver.
I prepared both Montana lectures with care—rehearsing them several times. Several days before the conference, Doug and I left Los Angeles in my go-kart of a car. Since we had thirteen hundred miles to drive, it made sense to enjoy some well-deserved R and R before the important seminar and conference. Erika didn’t come along; she couldn’t get time off from work.
Doug and I enjoyed our road trip from Los Angeles to Missoula. We drove through the searing desert in my car, which of course had no air conditioning, listening to Liz Phair, New Order, and other alternative rock bands. We spent a day in Las Vegas, walking the “Strip” and playing the slots at Circus Circus. We also made a side trip to Bryce Canyon National Park to marvel at the enormous amphitheaters of inverted red rock spires.
We were both excited to meet Bruce Berndt, and I was hopeful that the trip would lead ultimately to a job for me at UM. We couldn’t stop talking about what we hoped would happen in Missoula.
Instead, disaster struck for me, and it struck twice. My seminar at UM was an unmitigated catastrophe. I had devoted my fifty-minute lecture to describing my research on Galois representations, a topic that I had been thinking about for over two years. But nobody at UM, as I should have known, knew anything about those objects. Like most research mathematicians, I was working in a subspecialty that few mathematicians working in other fields would understand. I suppose I had figured that if I, a mere third-year graduate student, understood the stuff, then all those senior professors should understand it too. I should have been talking in broad generalities about my subject rather than the minute details that only experts in the field would care about.
But I wanted to make an impression, and I figured I could do that by presenting the theorems that I had proved. So I began my lecture with a short and perfunctory introduction, so as to leave ample time for the exposition of my results.
Imagine that you are a rocket engineer invited to lecture about rocket design to a room of engineers who are not, if you will pardon the expression, rocket scientists. You begin your lecture with a slide of a slingshot, followed by a brief history of ballistics and the early history of rocketry. But after five minutes of this, you jump into your minuscule area of expertise and spend the next forty-five minutes explaining in painful detail the calculations behind the latest improvements to oxidizer design. I was the mathematical version of that misguided engineer.
The rest of my talk was confusing and frustrating to the audience. And confused and frustrated audiences tend to stop listening after a few minutes. I doubt that anyone in the room paid any attention to my lecture after the first five or ten minutes. They were lost, and it was my fault for not taking the time to motivate my subject. In fact, my talk should have been mostly motivational with a brief mention of my results at the end. My theorems were the equivalent of oxidizer design. They did not merit such a full-court press in a presentation to a general audience. But I had wanted to strut my stuff.
After my lecture, McRae kindly offered me a bit of advice. I had not thought carefully about my audience. McRae was a gentleman, a warm man whom I continue to revere. Yet his soothing words were quickly forgotten when another professor approached me in the presence of many others in the department lounge. Sputtering with rage, he reproached me for wasting his time, fuming, “I have to say, I am a world leader in my field, and you aren’t. Have something to say before you decide to talk.” He then turned on his heels and stormed off, shaking his head in disgust without giving me an opportunity to apologize. What could I have said? As a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, I was an inexperienced lecturer, and the UM seminar was my first such presentation. I was devastated.
McRae overheard a bit of the conversation, and he tried to mollify me. He whispered that this professor had a reputation as an imperious grouch, who, far from being a world leader, actually had difficulty getting his papers accepted for publication.
But his words didn’t help. I was beyond help. I hadn’t given McRae, or anyone else, any reason to believe that I had proven much of anything. And in any case, my primary goal in giving the seminar should have been to prove that I was knowledgeable about my subject and could present my work to a diverse audience of mathematicians. I had done everything wrong, and I was distraught. I had hoped to impress the faculty, and instead I had fallen flat on my face. It didn’t matter whether my theorems were worth anything. I had given such a poor lecture that nobody was able to evaluate what I had done, not even the context in which I had done it. And I had pissed off a senior professor to boot.
Talking to Erika on the phone that night, I learned that she had attended high school with the angry professor’s son. And so a person who might well have been an advocate for me when I applied for a position at UM now despised me for wasting his time. The voices in my head had a new companion, another real live person to join my parents and the junior professor at Chicago. And this voice belonged to a mathematics professor at UM who even knew Erika’s family. It was humiliating. I worried that news of my poor performance would reach Erika’s parents. What would they think? I had arrived in Missoula hoping to make friends and influence people, and instead I had made an enemy and alienated everyone.
Disaster struck again a few days later at the MAA conference. After Berndt’s breathtaking plenary lecture on Ramanujan, Doug and I gave our contributed talks. I had carefully prepared a set of overhead projector transparencies, and I felt unable to modify my talk based on what I had learned from my failure at the UM seminar. Going into the talk, I knew I was in trouble. I was a dead man walking.
Berndt attended both of our talks. He congratulated me on an interesting presentation, but I could tell that he was just being polite. On the other hand, Berndt was deeply impressed by Doug’s talk, and at
lunch, I overheard him invite Doug to apply for a tenure track position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the top mathematics departments in the country.
Doug had done me a favor by agreeing to accompany me to Montana in the first place, and he had offered lots of sage advice on our long drive from Los Angeles to Missoula. And then at the meeting, which was so important to me, it was he who had ended up as the young star. He had been the one to impress Berndt, and I was at most a mere afterthought.
Doug certainly deserved the recognition he had received. But his stunning success and my abject failures were more than I could take. I told myself that I was happy for him, but actually, I was furious at him. I felt betrayed. I was the one who needed a success, and he had stepped in and carried off the prize. “You, too, Brutus,” I kept repeating, although neither Doug nor anyone else had stabbed me in the back. It was more like I had shot myself in the foot. Both feet, to be precise.
The voices in my head, the ones I had been struggling with for almost ten years, had been vindicated. I was no good, and despite my meticulous planning and preparation, I had failed, and my friend served as a barometer by which I could measure my inadequacy. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, says Shakespeare, but some, like me, are born to fail and achieve failure. My parents had always been critical of me, and now I worried that word of my disastrous performance would reach Erika’s parents. I had come to Missoula with such high hopes. The result was worse than anything I could have imagined.
The last day of the conference included a social event at Salish-Kootenai College, in Polson, a one-hour drive from Missoula, where the lectures had been held. Doug and I had planned to drive together. But then Doug accepted an invitation to ride along with Berndt, who was clearly courting him. There wasn’t room in the car for me, and since I had my own car, I decided to drive alone.
I like to drive with the radio on. But in the mountains of western Montana in 1992, my little go-kart couldn’t tune in any stations. It was raining, and I had only the voices in my head to keep me company:Ken-chan, you work hard, but you not good enough. Some professors kind to you, but you should not trust people who only have kind words. The critical professor is the one who speaks truth. Truth is that you wasting people’s time.
I had spent months preparing for my seminar and the contributed talk. Erika and I had talked at length about our high hopes for the future. We believed that Berndt’s presence and my seminar in her hometown were omens of imminent good fortune. We had even tempted fate by looking into the price of houses near campus. What was I going to tell her? How could I tell Erika that I had destroyed our chance for happiness? “Ken-chan, you spoil everything.”
On the road to Polson, near a place called Ronan, there is a long straight section that stretches a mile or two downhill. From the top of the hill you can see oncoming traffic long before it reaches you. When I saw a logging truck approaching in the distance, a plan of escape began to unfold. I visualized in slow motion the truck smashing into my car, first crumpling the hood, followed by a beautiful spider-web pattern of shattered windshield exploding in my face in a violent shockwave of wind, glass, and rain. The truck came closer and closer, and when it was close enough for my purposes, I swerved across the yellow line.
I don’t know what saved me. Perhaps it was the frantic blare of the trucker’s horn. All I can recall is coming to a stop on the side of the road and sitting in the car in the pouring rain with the engine running, shaking and dripping with sweat. I thank God for saving my life.
I couldn’t believe what I had almost done. Thwarted by the outcome of the disastrous meeting, I had lost all hope, and I was no longer myself. My actions seemed eerily to mirror Ramanujan’s own suicide attempt when his nomination for a Trinity College fellowship was denied. I had never had suicidal thoughts before, and I was frightened by what I had almost done. It was an impulsive act that I will never fully understand.
The next day, Doug and I left Missoula for our long drive back to Los Angeles. He had impressed a world expert, and his career was about to take off. (Two years later, Doug accepted a position at Urbana-Champaign.) Although I was happy for him, or at least that’s what I told myself, hearing him talk about his unexpected good fortune was maddening. I felt that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t escape the sense that the voices in my head had triumphed, and they were predicting a bleak and shameful future. There would be no André Weil to discover me as he had discovered my father in 1955. If there was ever a confluence of events that was supposed to serve that purpose, this meeting had been it. “Ken-chan, you impostor. You sweet-talk Paul Sally and Basil Gordon. Now you see what you really worth.”
I had hit bottom, and just when things had been looking up. Gordon had transformed me. I was now a budding mathematician who saw beauty in formulas and theories. I couldn’t stop thinking about mathematics. I had become addicted to mathematics like Ramanujan. But the rejection of my work, when I was so passionate about it, was almost more than I could take. That it wasn’t actually my work that been rejected, that I had simply given a couple of poorly conceived presentations, was something I was unable to see at the time. Unlike Ramanujan, who before being “discovered” by Hardy had been working all alone without recognition and had every reason to be depressed, I had a mentor who was carefully nurturing me. Nevertheless, in my depression I identified with Ramanujan, perhaps as a way of feeding my self-pity.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_28
28. A Miracle
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
Los Angeles (1993)
I didn’t tell Erika very much about the seminar and the conference. I couldn’t bring myself to admit to her that all our hopes had been dashed. I couldn’t tell her how badly I had failed. I also dreaded my next meeting with Gordon. I had let him down. I had imagined a triumphal march down Palisades Avenue to Gordon’s house to the sound of cheering crowds and popping champagne corks. In our time together, we had already had much to celebrate—mastering a difficult research paper, completing the proof of a theorem, the acceptance of a paper for publication. But there was nothing to celebrate now. I had pain to share, and I wanted to spare him, and myself. On the day of our usual meeting, I walked down Palisades Avenue accompanied by no sound but my beating heart. I reached the house and stepped up onto the porch, and then I froze. I must have stood for five full minutes staring at the heavy oak door before I could muster the courage to press the doorbell. I felt as if I had arrived at my own funeral. What was I going to say?
I began our meeting by giving Gordon a play-by-play account of the Missoula trip, and he listened attentively with his eyes closed, frowning and grimacing at the most painful moments. I could see that he was sharing my pain, visualizing the events as I retold them. I didn’t tell him about my brush with death near Ronan. I couldn’t.
After I finished relating most of the sordid details, he took a deep breath, and while staring off into the middle distance with his eyes wide open, he spoke slowly and deliberately: “If you can dream it, then you can do it.” It would not have been unusual for Gordon to have recited an epic poem or lines from Shakespeare, but Disney? After a long pause—it must have been at least a minute—he said it again, this time in full: “If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.” After another long pause, Gordon began to tell me why he had asked me to be his last PhD student.
He told me that he had felt that we were somehow destined to work as a team. There had been signs. We were both raised in Baltimore, and we both were identified as math prodigies at an early age. Although he had never met my father in person, he had read his pa
pers and books. He had studied my father’s important theorems on Tamagawa numbers and algebraic tori, and he had followed his more recent work in algebraic number theory. He was therefore delighted when I registered for his algebraic number theory course, and he was thrilled by my obvious interest in the subject.
Gordon saw beauty everywhere, but it was more than beauty. There was something spiritual in the things of this world, but also in the creations of the mind, so that along with Tennyson’s “The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,” he felt that art, music, poetry, and mathematics were also the vision of a higher power. Without a family of his own, he viewed his PhD students as his children, and in me he had felt a special bond that had begun from his longtime admiration of my father. There could be no more beautiful way to end his career than to advise me, poetically helping to extend my father’s legacy.
He had realized early on that I needed not only mathematical advising, but emotional support as well, and he had felt that he could provide both. He saw that I, like many other graduate students, viewed the doctoral degree as the single goal of graduate school, with coursework, qualifying exams, and the dissertation a series of hurdles to be overcome. I had been seeking a credential for the credential’s sake, a ticket that would allow me to move on to the next credential. Now after the many months we had spent working together, he explained that I had been transformed, that mathematics was no longer for me a means to an end but an end in itself. I had matured into a scientist. I was a mathematician. It was the creation of beautiful mathematics that was the true goal. Then he thanked me for sharing my transformation with him. I couldn’t believe it; he was thanking me when I was the one who should have been thanking him.
