The short life and hard times of a mathematical genius

Any proof pleases me: if I could prove by logic that you would be dead in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but the sorrow would be very much mitigated by my pleasure in the proof.

G. H. Hardy, one of the finest mathematicians of the 20th century and author of the best popular book about mathematical life, A Mathematician’s Apology, was a wistful and ascetic don at Trinity College, Cambridge. His lifelong collaborator was J. E. Littlewood. Though their rooms were only a corridor apart, they communicated almost entirely by postcard. But it is Hardy’s association with Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian clerk of David Leavitt’s new novel, that has kept him famous. An uneducated, superstitious, plump little fellow from a dust-and-temple village outside Madras, Ramanujan was among the greatest mathematical geniuses the world has ever seen.

The Indian Clerk is a fictional extrapolation of Hardy’s own spare account of his intense, exclusively intellectual partnership with Ramanujan, and Leavitt’s descriptions of the excitement of mathematical chase, the tussles with proofs, inspiration, the frustrations of algebraic rigour and the thrill of revelation are better than in any other novel involving mathematics that I’ve read.

But oooh … the sex.

After Ramanujan’s arrival in Cambridge in 1914, Leavitt has the wife of his host, the minor mathematician Eric Neville, fall in love with him. She begins by making Ramanujan something revolting for his supper, a ‘vegetable goose’, and ends by trying to snog him in his rooms — snog Ramanujan! — then she flees to London (the symbol of all failed rectitude in The Indian Clerk) and turns into a Swedish translator. Then Hardy — Hardy, the ascetic! He has a fantasy about a battlefield — two officers, tattered uniform etc.