SIR FRANCIS SPRING TO C.B. COTTERELL
RECOMMENDATION TO LORD PENTLAND,
GOVERNOR OF MADRAS


Madras,             
5th Feb., 1914.
My dear Cotterell,
       If I understand right, His Excellency * has the Educational portfolio. So I am anxious to interest him in a matter which I presume will come before him within the next few days - a matter which under the circumstances is, I believe, very urgent. It relates to the affairs of a clerk of my office named S. Ramanujan, who, as I think His Excellency has already heard from me, is pronounced by very high mathematical authorities to be a Mathematician of a new and high, if not transcendental, order of genius.
       A few months ago the Madras University gave S. Ramanujan a scholarship to enable him to fill certain gaps in his education which operated to prevent his conveying his conceptions to the outside world. Meanwhile during the last 8 or 9 months various Mathematicians in the first rank in Cambridge, Simla and Madras have had before them selections from his work and have pronounced upon them in terms of the very highest eulogy.

       Just now, as probably His Excellency is aware, a Mr. Neville, who, I think, is a Senior Wrangler and a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, has been in Madras giving a series of lectures on certain phases of the Higher Mathematics to Honours students and others interested. Under a mandate from Cambridge, he has interested himself greatly in Ramanujan and there is every reason to hope that he may be persuaded to go to Cambridge for a year or two so that under expert guidance not only may the fruits of his genius be given to the world but also we may hope, his own fame, future usefulness and personal prosperity may be secured - matters probably quite impossible if he remained in a backwater like Madras for the rest of his life.

       I now come to the point where His Excellency may perhaps be able to interfere with advantage. Last evening I learnt from Mr. Littlehailes and others that the University Syndicate had decided, subject to sanction: of Government, to set aside a sum of Rs. 10,000 in order to secure Ramanujan's visit to England for a couple of years. Messrs. Littlehailes and Neville begged me to intercede with His Excellency with a view to the speedy confirmation of this action of the University Syndicate. But I wish to make it quite clear that I write under no mandate from the Syndicate but merely as a private individual interested in my own employee, Ramanujan, as well as in Mathematics.

       Mr. Arthur Davies will doubtless arrange for the voyage to England and that Ramanujan's orthodoxy may be maintained unimpaired. Mr. Neville assures me that he will meet him on his arrival in London and conduct him personally to Cambridge and that when there he will interest himself personally in his welfare, generally and in all matters of Brahman orthodoxy, so that he may return to India without any loss of the esteem of his caste men.

       I myself am very far from being Mathematician enough to express adequately what has been said to me by several who are fully qualified to express an opinion on the subject of the potential value of the science of the new line of thought in which Ramanujan's investigations lie. I am assured however by those; who ought to know what I am talking "about that they may conceivably be epoch-making and as such well worthy of financial support at the hands of the Madras University
       Needless to say Prof. Hardy and other high Mathematicians may be trusted to give Ramanujan the fullest credit in the scientific world for his work. My reason for saying anything so obvious as this is that I am told that certain of his Indian friends have been suggesting to him that the scientists' of England desire is to steal his ideas - obviously an utterly impossible suggestion with men of their class.

Yours sincerely,       
Francis J. E. Spring.