RSS

Contact us

Tuesday 2 December 2008

The Indian Clerk

The short life and hard times of a mathematical genius

Alexander Masters on David Leavitt's latest novel

It is easy to make this sound silly or irrelevant; it is not. Leavitt writes clever, thoughtful prose. In another section, the bust of Hardy’s former lover, Gaye, comes to life. The purpose is to suggest that Hardy, by his failure to appreciate the emotional needs of first Gaye and now Ramanujan, perhaps drove both to the edge of death. Hardy’s involvement with Thayer, who keeps getting bits blown off him at the front, returned to various military hospitals, then sent back to get smashed around a bit more, is Hardy’s carnal version of Ramanujan. ‘In much the same way,’ Leavitt has Hardy realise, ‘we broke Ramanujan, and patched him together again, and broke him again, until we had squeezed all the use we could out of him. Until he could manage no more.’ Only then did they let him go back to India.

Trinity does not come out well in this story either. Reluctant to bring Ramanujan over, stingy with money and support once he had arrived, it at first refused to elect him to a fellowship on grounds that included not wanting a nigger on the staff, and until recently at least, there was no portrait of Ramanujan, their greatest intellect since Newton, anywhere in the building. In late 1917 or early 1918 Ramanujan tried to jump under a train. Permanently cold, fed on food he detested, he contracted an illness that might have been tuberculosis, and was sent to a sanatorium where he had to hide in the toilet, the only warm place in the building, to scribble down the results of his startling mathematical explorations. Partition Functions, the Riemann Hypothesis, the Zeta Function, the distribution of primes, Ramanujan’s own charming inventions of ‘rounded numbers’ and highly composite numbers: Leavitt manages to convey some of the importance and extraordinariness of them all.

At the end of the war, Ramanujan returned to India, where his decline became rapid. He died a year later. He was 33.

I still say to myself when I am depressed [Hardy wrote in A Mathematician’s Apology] and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved