Footnotes

... Ramanujan¹

This extract has been taken from the Book "Srinivasa Ramaujan: A Mathematical Genius " by K. Srinivasa rao.

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... reply²

Setting

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... Tripos³

An excellent exposition of the Mathematical Tripos of Cambridge, a coveted examination which Hardy took but in later years denounced, can be found in Kanigel [X].

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... notebooks⁴

Chapter 3 of this work is devoted to these Notebooks.

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... out⁵

Private communication.

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... Squares⁶ Probably Ramanujan's expertise in preparing the conflict free time tables for his School inspired him to a study of these Magic Squares.

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... numbers⁷ The first few Bernoulli numbers [27] are:

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... respectively⁸ The Riemann zeta-function is defined as:

. The

function has a unique analytic continuation to the point

, where we get

, which is what Ramanujan writes as:

. In the `zeta function regularization' method resorted to by String theorists, this result is used for understanding the necessity of choosing the space-time coordinates to be 26 to ensure the Lorentz invariance of the light cone formalism [80, p.96]. I am thankful to Prof. R. Ramachandran for drawing my attention to this point.

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... month⁹ Ramanujan was getting a salary of Rs. 25/- per month when he was in the A.G.'s Office and Rs. 30/- p.m. when he was at the Madras Port Trust. Also, The salary of a Professor in those days was Rs. 225/- per month.

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... reports¹⁰ For these reports refer [VIII].

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...naturalgenius¹¹ The underlining in this passage is by the author of this work and not by C.P. Snow.

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... letters¹² Refer Bruce C. Berndt and Robert A. Rankin : Ramanujan : Letters and Commentary [XI], for these and other letters referred to in this Chapter.

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... prejudices¹³ Crossing the oceans was considered a sacrilege by the Hindu Brahmins and often people who did so were, on their return to India, treated as outcastes. All relationships with the individual and even their families were shunned!

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... outfit¹⁴

The second class fare between London and Bombay was £32 in 1914, or about Rs. 480. (British Passenger Liners of the Five Oceans, by C.R. Vernon Gibbs (London: Putnam, 1963), 63. cf.[X], p.397).

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... books¹⁵ From the article of Mr. Narayana Iyer's son [I, p.112], as stated earlier, Ramanujan had access to a book on Jacobi's elliptic functions. Unfortunately, it is not possible to ascertain, from the records of the Library of the University of Madras, what books were available for reference to Ramanujan.

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... war¹⁶ Ramanujan was perhaps referring to the departure of Mr. J.E. Littlewood.

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... F.R.S.¹⁷ Private communication, by e-mail, dated 29 March 1996.

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... stone¹⁸ One Stone weight is equal to 14 pounds.

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... fifty ¹⁹ A few examples which can be cited which explode The Myth of the Young Mathematician are: Newton's Principia was written when he was in his mid 40s; Euler, despite his blindness, produced his three volumes on integral calculus when he was in his 60s; Gauss at 34 proposed his theory of analytic functions; and in more recent times, Cartan, Poincaré, Siegel, Kolmogorov and Erdös exhibited creativity in mathematics in their later years. (cf. Susan Landau, Notices of the AMS 44 (1997) 1284).

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... Street²⁰

The street names in Madras (officially renamed Chennai in 1996) have been renamed by caste conscious State Government regimes. So ridiculous were some of the changes that N.S.C. Bose Road, Krishnamachari Road and Dr. Nair Road became, respectively, N.S.C. Road, Krishnama Road and Doctor Road! Needless to say, the Government turned a deaf ear to appeals, in 1987, to rename a stretch of Wallajah Road, on which the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics of the University of Madras is situated, as Ramanujan Road.

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... Bombay²¹ Bombay has been recently renamed as Mumbai.

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... others²² The author accompanied some of them to see the gracious old lady. On one such occasion, when a visitor asked her whether she had conjugal relationships with her husband, her face beamed and she answered in the affirmative.

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... Foundation ²³ Mr. A.P. Venkateswaran, the Secretary of the Foundation, at the instance of Prof. E.C.G. Sudarshan, the then Director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madras, was instrumental in presenting a purse of Rs. 20,000/- to Janakiammal, from the funds of the Hinduja Foundation. An honorarium of Rs.1000/- per month was also announced, at this function at the Institute's premises, presided over by its Patron, Mr. C. Subramaniam, and organized by the author, on Aug. 13, 1987.

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... formulae²⁴ This was probably his way of explaining away his incomparable intuition and success, to those who could not comprehend his ability to churn out continuously new results but who persisted in questioning him as to how he arrived at those results!

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