FROM
OBSCURITY TO FAME
E.
H. NEVILLE
Late
Prof. E. H. Neville of Cambridge played a notable part in Ramanujan's
meteoric rise. He gives a very moving account of his association with
Ramanujan.
FIRST
LETTER TO HARDY
…
Ramanujan’s name had become well known in Cambridge, the home
of mathematics in England. G. H. Hardy, then a young lecturer at Trinity
College and now the dominant figure among English mathematicians, who
was destined to be closely associated with Ramanujan in the future,
has sometimes said that Ramanujan was his discovery, but the truth is
that Ramanujan chose Hardy. In a booklet dated 1910, Ramanujan found
for the first time formulae like some of his own, and acting on the
advice of Seshu Aiyar, he wrote on January 16, 1913, a letter to the
unknown author. No one who was in the mathematical circles in Cambridge
at that time can forget the sensation caused by this letter. An obscure
Indian clerk was appealing for advice because he was inexperienced,
for help in the publication of his theorems because he was poor. ‘But
only’, he said, ‘if you are convinced that there is anything
of value. Of the theorems sent without demonstrations by this clerk
of whom we had never heard, not one could have been set in the most
advanced mathematical examination in the world’. It must be confessed
that the first suggestion was that the letter was a hoax, that the theorems
must be familiar theorems, skillfully disguised, but this explanation
was soon abandoned for there were some formulae in the letter for which
it certainly could not account.
Of
these Hardy has said, “They defeated me completely; I had never
seen anything in the least like them before. 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.” A great mathematician
who has discovered formulae of an entirely novel kind does not use them
to mystify his friends.
END
OF INTELLECTUAL SOLITUDE
Hardy answered the letter promptly and Ramanujan knew that at last his intellectual solitude was at an end. His friends in India encouraged him and supported him, but none of them had the knowledge to bring him the human satisfaction of being understood and appreciated …
I
visited Madras myself in the opening of 1914. After my first lecture Ramanujan
was introduced. We sat down, and he turned the pages of a notebook. Two
days later he turned the pages again, and after our third meeting he said,
“Perhaps you would like to take it away with you”. The astounding
compliment took away my breath. The priceless volume had never been out
of his hands: no Indian could understand it, no Englishman was to be trusted
with it. The truth was, of course, that the English were objects of suspicion
not as individuals but as components of the governing machinery; I came
from outside the machine, and for no other reason than that, I enjoyed
an overwhelming advantage which was grossly unfair. Richard Littlehailes,
the Professor of Mathematics, in particular, had done and was to do far
more for Ramanujan in Madras than I did.
IMPORTANCE
TO HIM OF A STAY IN ENGLAND
Ramanujan's
trust having been won so completely, I raised immediately the question
of Cambridge, and found to my delight and surprise that Ramanujan needed
no converting and that his parents' opposition had been withdrawn. In
a vivid dream his mother had seen him surrounded by Europeans and heard
the Goddess Namagiri commanding her to stand no longer between her son
and the fulfilment of his life’s purpose. Lest he should be harassed
presently by attempts to dissuade him, I addressed myself to the task
of convincing his friends that the proposal was in Ramanujan’s own
interest. I wrote at once to Hardy that the intangible obstacles had disappeared
and that he must see that financial provision was made; I should try to
obtain grants in Madras. But if I failed, the money must somehow be found
in England. I do not know what account I gave of Ramanujan and the notebooks,
but I made it abundantly clear that if Ramanujan was willing to come,
financial difficulties simply must not be allowed to interfere. For a
moment Hardy faltered. ‘Be careful what you promise’, he wrote,
and he forwarded cautious memorandum of the “We-have-heard-of-those-untaught-geniuses-
before” types, from the India Office in London. I claim no credit
for ignoring this warning and laughing at Hardy's endorsement of it ;
I had seen the notebooks and talked with Ramanujan, and Hardy had not.
Moreover while letters were travelling between Madras and London, it was
becoming likely that all the money wanted would be found in India. Littlehailes
introduced me to everyone who carried weight in the University or in the
civil administration; everywhere I talked of Ramanujan, explained as I
have tried to do now the importance to him of a stay in Cambridge, and
urged generosity. On January 28, I addressed to the University authorities
a prospective memorandum. Littlehailes drafted proposals in detail, and
within a week the University, with the approval of the Government, had
created a scholarship ample to maintain Ramanujan in Cambridge and his
wife and mother in Kumbakonam. A few days later I left Madras.
LIFE
IN A STRANGE CIVILIZATION
It
was in April 1914 that Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge, where he lived
in my house until residential accommodation became available for him in
July in Trinity. He felt the petty miseries of life in a strange civilization,
the vegetables that were unpalatable because they were unfamiliar, the
shoes that tormented feet that had been unconfined for 26 years, but he
was a happy man, revelling in the mathematical society, which he was entering,
and idolized by the Indian students…
A
LOVABLE MAN
I
must not end without making an attempt to describe the man himself. In
figure he was a little below medium height, and stout until emaciated
by disease; he had a big head with long black hair brushed sidewards above
a high forehead, his face and his complexion never really dark, grew paler
during his life in England; his ears were small, his nose broad, and always
his shining eyes were the conspicuous features that Ramachandra Rao observed
in 1910. He walked stiffly, with head erect and toes outturned: if he
was not talking as he walked, his arms were held clear of the body, with
hands open and palms downwards. But when he talked, whether he was walking
or standing, sitting or lying down, his slender fingers were for ever
alive, as eloquent as his countenance. He had a fund of stories, and such
was his enjoyment in telling them that in his great days his own irrepressible
laughter often swallowed the climax of his narrative. He loved a paradox,
but I do not know of any that he invented; the paradoxical element in
some of his own early work must have made him aware that the wildest nonsense
of today may receive a logical interpretation of tomorrow. He had serious
interests outside mathematics, and was always ready to discuss politics
or philosophy. Loss of caste was a price he was prepared to pay for coming
to England, but he kept the price as low as he could by adhering as closely
as circumstances permitted to the observance of his religious practices
and in particular in maintaining the strictest vegetarianism. “When
I go back”, he said to me once, “I shall never be asked to
a funeral” and if he spoke with a sigh there was no sense of pollution
mingled with his regret. In everyday life he had an instinctive perfection
of manners that made him a delightful guest or companion. Success and
fame left his natural simplicity untouched. To his friends he was devoted
beyond measure, and he devised curiously personal ways of showing his
gratitude and expressing his affection. The wonderful mathematician was
indeed a lovable man.
Had
Ramanujan not left India he might be alive today; but he would have had
always the sense of power and frustration, not of power and accomplishment.
Death, too, was a frustration, but the life's purpose of which his mother
dreamed was at last in part fulfilled and it is better to be frustrated
by unsought death than by life. So Srinivasa Ramanujan believed, for he
told me just before he left England that he had never doubted that he
did well to come.