yet."
"Well, if you want my advice, which you may not, there's only one course to take, and that's to get a man to Madras. And soon.
I think Neville's supposed to give some lectures there in December."
"Neville?"
"Don't scoff. He's a decent chap."
"Neville is a perfectly capable mathematician who will never in his life do anything of consequence."
"The ideal emissary, then." Littlewood laughs. "Let's bring him in on it, shall we? And then, when he gets to Madras, he can
see this Ramanujan, feel him out, see what he wants and if he's what we want."
"But is Neville capable of such discernment?"
"If he's not, his wife is. Have you met Alice Neville? An impressive young woman." Littlewood is already moving toward the
door. "Yes, it's the best plan. What's the saying? If you can't bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed."
"Wrong religion," Hardy says.
"Oh, well, Vishnu then! Good God, Hardy, you can be quite a stickler." But Littlewood is laughing as he says this, laughing
as he descends the stairs, laughing as, with a whistle and whoop, he steps out onto the rain-soaked paving stones of New Court.
10
New Lecture Hall, Harvard University
O N THE LAST DAY of August, 1936, the great mathematician G. H. Hardy put down his chalk and returned to the dais. "The real
tragedy about Ramanujan," he said, "was not his early death. It is of course a disaster that any great man should die young,
but a mathematician is often comparatively old at thirty, and his death may be less of a catastrophe than it seems. Abel died
at twenty-six and, although he would no doubt have added a great deal more to mathematics, he could hardly have become a greater
man. The tragedy of Ramanujan was not that he died young, but that, during his five unfortunate years, his genius was misdirected,
sidetracked, and to a certain extent distorted."
He paused. Did his audience understand what he meant? Might they think that he was referring to the five years Ramanujan spent
in England?
No, he wanted to say, not his years in England. I mean the crucial years just before he came to England, when he needed education as a newborn child
needs oxygen.
Or perhaps—and here, in his own mind, he stepped back—I really do mean his years in England, which in their way were also
years of damage.
He would have liked to say:
So little seems certain anymore. Words that I wrote in the immediate aftermath of his death, when I read them today, strike
me as rank with sentimentality. They emanate the desperation of a man trying to escape guilt and blame. I tried to make a
virtue of his ignorance, to persuade myself and others that he profited from the years he spent in isolation, when in fact
they were an insurmountable handicap.
Nothing ever came easily to him, and there is no way to pretend that this was to his good. He was very poor and lived in a
provincial town, more than a day's journey from Madras. And though he went to school (he was of a high caste), school was
not kind to him. Starting when he was fifteen, sixteen, he was treated as a pariah. The Indian educational system, in those
years, was terribly rigid, far more rigid than our own, on which it was modeled. The system rewarded the nebulous ideal of
"well-roundedness"; it was designed to churn out the bureaucrats and technicians who would oversee the Indian empire (under
our supervision, of course). What it was not designed to do was to recognize genius—its obsessiveness and its blindness, its
refusal to be anything other than what it is.
School after school failed Ramanujan because at school after school he ignored all his subjects except mathematics. Even at
mathematics he was at times mediocre, because the mathematics that he was being taught bored and irritated him. From his youth—from
when he was seven, eight years of age—he was following the signposts of his own imagination.
One example will suffice. When he was eleven,
"Well, if you want my advice, which you may not, there's only one course to take, and that's to get a man to Madras. And soon.
I think Neville's supposed to give some lectures there in December."
"Neville?"
"Don't scoff. He's a decent chap."
"Neville is a perfectly capable mathematician who will never in his life do anything of consequence."
"The ideal emissary, then." Littlewood laughs. "Let's bring him in on it, shall we? And then, when he gets to Madras, he can
see this Ramanujan, feel him out, see what he wants and if he's what we want."
"But is Neville capable of such discernment?"
"If he's not, his wife is. Have you met Alice Neville? An impressive young woman." Littlewood is already moving toward the
door. "Yes, it's the best plan. What's the saying? If you can't bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed."
"Wrong religion," Hardy says.
"Oh, well, Vishnu then! Good God, Hardy, you can be quite a stickler." But Littlewood is laughing as he says this, laughing
as he descends the stairs, laughing as, with a whistle and whoop, he steps out onto the rain-soaked paving stones of New Court.
10
New Lecture Hall, Harvard University
O N THE LAST DAY of August, 1936, the great mathematician G. H. Hardy put down his chalk and returned to the dais. "The real
tragedy about Ramanujan," he said, "was not his early death. It is of course a disaster that any great man should die young,
but a mathematician is often comparatively old at thirty, and his death may be less of a catastrophe than it seems. Abel died
at twenty-six and, although he would no doubt have added a great deal more to mathematics, he could hardly have become a greater
man. The tragedy of Ramanujan was not that he died young, but that, during his five unfortunate years, his genius was misdirected,
sidetracked, and to a certain extent distorted."
He paused. Did his audience understand what he meant? Might they think that he was referring to the five years Ramanujan spent
in England?
No, he wanted to say, not his years in England. I mean the crucial years just before he came to England, when he needed education as a newborn child
needs oxygen.
Or perhaps—and here, in his own mind, he stepped back—I really do mean his years in England, which in their way were also
years of damage.
He would have liked to say:
So little seems certain anymore. Words that I wrote in the immediate aftermath of his death, when I read them today, strike
me as rank with sentimentality. They emanate the desperation of a man trying to escape guilt and blame. I tried to make a
virtue of his ignorance, to persuade myself and others that he profited from the years he spent in isolation, when in fact
they were an insurmountable handicap.
Nothing ever came easily to him, and there is no way to pretend that this was to his good. He was very poor and lived in a
provincial town, more than a day's journey from Madras. And though he went to school (he was of a high caste), school was
not kind to him. Starting when he was fifteen, sixteen, he was treated as a pariah. The Indian educational system, in those
years, was terribly rigid, far more rigid than our own, on which it was modeled. The system rewarded the nebulous ideal of
"well-roundedness"; it was designed to churn out the bureaucrats and technicians who would oversee the Indian empire (under
our supervision, of course). What it was not designed to do was to recognize genius—its obsessiveness and its blindness, its
refusal to be anything other than what it is.
School after school failed Ramanujan because at school after school he ignored all his subjects except mathematics. Even at
mathematics he was at times mediocre, because the mathematics that he was being taught bored and irritated him. From his youth—from
when he was seven, eight years of age—he was following the signposts of his own imagination.
One example will suffice. When he was eleven,
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