Thread by @visakanv, I want to do a thread about Srinivasa Ramanujan, the mathematician. He [...]

I want to do a thread about Srinivasa Ramanujan, the mathematician. He lived a short but brilliant life of 32 years. He was born in 1887 in Erode, and he lived and died in Kumbakonam – not too far from where my grandparents were from

To contextualize people's lives from the past, I like to find out who else was born in the same year

also born in 1887 were:

Chiang Kai-shek, president of ROC/Taiwan
Erwin Schrödinger (famous for the cat)
Le Corbusier, the architect and urban planner
Marcel Duchamp, the artist

What else was going on in the 1880s?

The Orient Express starts running from Paris to Constantinople

France begins colonizing Indochina (Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia)

George Eastman releases the Kodak 1

Benz and Daimler introduce their automobiles (ad from a few years later)

Back to Ramanujan. Who was he?

He was a brilliant self-taught mathematician

at 11 he "exhausted the mathematical knowledge of college students"

by 13 he mastered advanced trigonometry

At 17, his peers said they "rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe" of him

At 15, he developed his *own* method to solve quartic functions f(x) = ax^4 + bx^3 + cx^2 + dx + e

at 16, he independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers

he also calculated Euler's constant up to 15 decimal places

clearly, he lived and breathed mathematics

Now imagine this

he's the best mathematician around

he's from a poor-ish family – dad was a clerk at a sari shop, mom's a housewife

he wins a college scholarship – but he's so obsessed with math that he couldn't focus on other subjects! so he lost the scholarship

But while "the system" didn't appreciate his genius, individuals did

In 1910, at 23, he met the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society

His work was so impressive, people couldn't understand it, and doubted it was real

I have two sets of feelings reading about Ramanujan's life

- how sad it is that a person like this, despite his talent, has to struggle and beg to survive

- how wonderful it is that there are a handful of people in the world who recognize talent, and encourage it

now we get to my favorite part of Ramanujan's story, and if I'm not careful I'm going to start crying

Ramanujan's new peers encouraged him to write to mathematicians in Britain

a bunch of them dismissed and disregarded him

Except for one man: Godfrey Harold Hardy

Hardy himself was a highly accomplished math genius

but when asked what his greatest contribution to mathematics was, he unhesitatingly replied that it was the discovery of Ramanujan.

He called their collaboration "the one romantic incident in my life."

Initially, Ramanujan and Hardy's relationship was purely via mail. When Hardy received this letter, he began to make arrangements to invite Ramanujan to Cambridge. Ramanujan initially hesitated (family, religion) – but then changed his mind after his mother had a compelling dream

I was re-reading about Ramanujan around the time I was myself heading to San Francisco earlier in May (leaving Asia for the first time) – and I was curious to know as many details about his actual trip as possible. Dietary concerns, for eg

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/

Wikipedia says Ramanujan departed from Madras aboard the S.S. Nevasa on 17 March 1914, and disembarked in London 28 days later. What was that like for him? Did he journal? Was he excited? Nervous? Scared? Must've been wild for a young Tamil man in 1914. Did he go through Suez?

(I spent like a stupid 30 minutes trying to find a depiction of the sea route from Madras to London in 1914 and I can't find anything decent. Anyway just for fun here's what it would be like to walk from Chennai to London. Takes ~80 days. Not sure if that include sleep.)

Here's a picture of Ramanujan outside the Senate House, Cambridge, c.1914–19. Hardy is on the far right.

I find this picture very moving. 100 years ago, a nerd geeking out in near-isolation was brought 10,000 km across the Earth by his fellow nerds so they could nerd together

I'm no Ramanujan, but I got to experience my own version of this 100 years later when Twitter friends in San Francisco put me in a airplane and hosted me in their homes