I just finished reading The Man Who Knew Infinity. Like many of my fellow countrymen, I was aware of Ramanujan. His brilliance is legendary, but the human behind it is rarely spoken about. There is a mystique about his mathematical prowess. We might call it intuition or something else entirely. Only Ramanujan knows his methods, and how he knew what he knew is beside the point. But there is another side, the more mundane but equally important one that we can all relate to—the side that craves validation, that covets recognition, that is bound by tradition and societal conventions.
There were many instances where I kept wondering:
- He had to re-discover what was common knowledge in the West. What if Ramanujan had been exposed to centuries of mathematical progress during his adolescence?
- What if Ramanujan never had to leave his home and familiar surroundings, never had to starve for food and affection, never fell ill and perished at the age of 32?
The book hinted at similar lines too, and it seemed like an entirely appropriate way to reckon with the lost genius. But therein lies our cruelty. Ramanujan never cared for practical applications of his mathematics. He just loved working with numbers, and that was all he needed. Mathematics was a way for him to express his art. Ramanujan did not owe us—the rest of humanity—anything in return for his extraordinary gifts.
The tragedy is not in some unrealized contribution his genius would have made to humankind’s progress. The tragedy is simply that a person who found joy and meaning in his work suffered and died young. His suffering matters not because of what more he could have given us, but because suffering itself is tragic.