studying at Town High School in Kumbakonam, his maths teacher explained that
if you divide any number by itself, you will get 1. If you have sixteen bananas and divided them among sixteen people, each
will get one banana. If you have 10,000 bananas and divide them among 10,000 people, each will get one banana. Then Ramanujan
stood up and asked what would happen if you divided no bananas among no people.
You see, even then, when he was still doing well, the troublemaker in him was starting to emerge.
I think I sensed all this from his early letters. He was a man whom the dispensers of prizes had failed to esteem properly
and he resented them for it. Naturally this rejection led him to doubt his own worth; and yet from the start he also displayed
a certain hubris, a faith in his genius, and took a solitary pride in knowing that he was better than his time and place.
If the world in which he lived failed to value him, it was that world's fault, not his own. Why should he then cooperate?
Yet this is a very lonely sort of victory.
Of course, in this regard I was his opposite. I was the boy who won all the prizes—this, though I despised prize day with
an intensity that today only the sight of a church procession is likely to rouse in me. To hear my name called, and then to
have to get up before the entire school to accept my prize, provoked in me such a furor of shame and self-loathing as to make
my legs wobble; I would stagger onto the stage in a kind of fever, take the book or token with clammy hands, grit my teeth
so as not to vomit. By the time I got to Winchester, this peculiar variant of stage fright had got so bad that I started deliberately
giving the wrong answers on examinations, just in order to be spared the ordeal of the prize. But not—I must be truthful about
this—often enough that I might jeopardize my future. For I craved the imprimatur of Oxford or Cambridge, the approbation that
Ramanujan was denied.
Why such hatred of prizes? I think it was because I knew, even as I excelled on its greeneries, that the playing field was
rigged. It was rigged to reward the rich, the well fed, the well cared for. And, as my parents made sure constantly to remind
me, I was not one of these. I was lucky to be there at all. Talent would not assist the son of the miner in Wales: he'd spend his life in the mines, even if he had the proof for the Riemann hypothesis in his head. Always my parents told me to
pray for my own good fortune, and theirs.
Perhaps it is a sign of weakness that I played by the rules. No doubt some future biographer (if I merit one) will censure
me for this failure of nerve. For there is another way to look at Ramanujan: as the resolute mind whom genius permits no other
course but to follow its instincts, even at its own peril.
Once I arrived at Cambridge my mistrust of prizes, rather than abating, found a new target in the tripos. The men I despised
the most were the ones who, unlike me and Littlewood, viewed victory on the tripos as a goal in its own right, and made wranglerhood
the object of their education. It was to stop in its tracks the system that encouraged such fevered ambitions and immoderate
hungers that I set out to reform the tripos, if not abolish it outright. And the ironic result of my success was this: never
was the fever for tripos victory so intense as it was in 1909, the year the last senior wrangler was to be crowned.
Which brings me to Eric Neville—the man some credit with persuading Ramanujan to come to England. Later on, we became friends,
and remain friends to this day, his wife notwithstanding. In 1909, however, Neville existed for me merely in one dimension,
as the man considered the favorite, that year, to be senior wrangler. As it turned out, he came in second, and I remember
gloating a little bit, thinking that he would never recover from the disappointment. He wanted so desperately to go down in
history as the last
if you divide any number by itself, you will get 1. If you have sixteen bananas and divided them among sixteen people, each
will get one banana. If you have 10,000 bananas and divide them among 10,000 people, each will get one banana. Then Ramanujan
stood up and asked what would happen if you divided no bananas among no people.
You see, even then, when he was still doing well, the troublemaker in him was starting to emerge.
I think I sensed all this from his early letters. He was a man whom the dispensers of prizes had failed to esteem properly
and he resented them for it. Naturally this rejection led him to doubt his own worth; and yet from the start he also displayed
a certain hubris, a faith in his genius, and took a solitary pride in knowing that he was better than his time and place.
If the world in which he lived failed to value him, it was that world's fault, not his own. Why should he then cooperate?
Yet this is a very lonely sort of victory.
Of course, in this regard I was his opposite. I was the boy who won all the prizes—this, though I despised prize day with
an intensity that today only the sight of a church procession is likely to rouse in me. To hear my name called, and then to
have to get up before the entire school to accept my prize, provoked in me such a furor of shame and self-loathing as to make
my legs wobble; I would stagger onto the stage in a kind of fever, take the book or token with clammy hands, grit my teeth
so as not to vomit. By the time I got to Winchester, this peculiar variant of stage fright had got so bad that I started deliberately
giving the wrong answers on examinations, just in order to be spared the ordeal of the prize. But not—I must be truthful about
this—often enough that I might jeopardize my future. For I craved the imprimatur of Oxford or Cambridge, the approbation that
Ramanujan was denied.
Why such hatred of prizes? I think it was because I knew, even as I excelled on its greeneries, that the playing field was
rigged. It was rigged to reward the rich, the well fed, the well cared for. And, as my parents made sure constantly to remind
me, I was not one of these. I was lucky to be there at all. Talent would not assist the son of the miner in Wales: he'd spend his life in the mines, even if he had the proof for the Riemann hypothesis in his head. Always my parents told me to
pray for my own good fortune, and theirs.
Perhaps it is a sign of weakness that I played by the rules. No doubt some future biographer (if I merit one) will censure
me for this failure of nerve. For there is another way to look at Ramanujan: as the resolute mind whom genius permits no other
course but to follow its instincts, even at its own peril.
Once I arrived at Cambridge my mistrust of prizes, rather than abating, found a new target in the tripos. The men I despised
the most were the ones who, unlike me and Littlewood, viewed victory on the tripos as a goal in its own right, and made wranglerhood
the object of their education. It was to stop in its tracks the system that encouraged such fevered ambitions and immoderate
hungers that I set out to reform the tripos, if not abolish it outright. And the ironic result of my success was this: never
was the fever for tripos victory so intense as it was in 1909, the year the last senior wrangler was to be crowned.
Which brings me to Eric Neville—the man some credit with persuading Ramanujan to come to England. Later on, we became friends,
and remain friends to this day, his wife notwithstanding. In 1909, however, Neville existed for me merely in one dimension,
as the man considered the favorite, that year, to be senior wrangler. As it turned out, he came in second, and I remember
gloating a little bit, thinking that he would never recover from the disappointment. He wanted so desperately to go down in
history as the last
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