Theater Review
Indian Math Genius Ramanujan
Brought Back to Life on Viennese Stage
By Kulamarva Balakrishna
Vienna, Austria: As summer glows in Europe, the public gets treated to numerous cultural events. They are presented around the Continent as parts of annual festivals. In Vienna, an alluring and provocative cultural event this year was the staging of A Disappearing Number, a play about Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the 20th century’s most important mathematicians, and his mentor at Cambridge University, Prof. Godfrey H. Hardy. The play is conceived and directed by Simon McBurney, who shot into fame in 2002 through another play, The Noise of Time.
Ramanujan was a mere clerk in the accounts department of the Madras Port Trust before Hardy, who was already a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, persuaded him to leave Madras (now known as Chennai) and join him at Cambridge. The play portrays the collaborative mathematical investigations of the two geniuses. The two are presented on the stage as no more than mere spectators. As they watch, the play develops around a woman who is crazy about numbers. She dies early, leaving behind her husband, a medical doctor. He later develops a passion for finding out how his late wife got fascinated by mathematics.
The doctor goes to India to look up in libraries where his wife had left traces of her work. It is a parallel reconstruction of the lives of the imaginary young woman as well as the genius who startled the world with his contributions to mathematics. The complex, experimental presentation on stage lasted about 90 minutes, keeping the academicians in the audience spellbound.
Contact with Cambridge Professor
Ramanujan, a devout Brahmin born into a poor family in South India, on December 22, 1887, came to the awareness of the teacher of mathematics at the West’s 800-year-old temple of learning through a letter he wrote in 1913. Ramanujan had sent with the letter a few samples of math theorems he had been working on. Hardy instantly spotted the genius in the man. He arranged for a grant for Ramanujan to go to Cambridge and work with him.
They worked together for five years, from 1915 to 1919, validating thousands of theorems in mathematics. By the time Ramanujan completed his "Investigation in Elliptic Functions and Theory of Numbers," he had also become a Fellow of Trinity College. Just before that, he had become a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the youngest and the second Indian to reach that position.
Prof. Hardy was astonished by the depth and profundity of Ramanujan’s knowledge. During the short life span of 32 years, he had compiled an estimated 3,900 theorems. On a scale of 0 to 100, Hardy rated himself and other contemporary mathematicians at Cambridge as follows: Hardy – 25, J.E. Littlewood – 30, Hilbert – 80, and Ramanujan – 100.
In 1919, Ramanujan was forced to return to India because of illness, suspected at the time to be tuberculosis. He died in India on April 26, 1920. An analysis of his medical records done in 1994 concluded that his illness was hepatitis.
According to acclaimed Indian astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar, Ramanujan was Nobel material. Narlikar recognized him as the originator of a whole new line of investigations in the theory of composite numbers (numbers with numerous factors). He considered Ramanujan’s work one of the top ten achievements if the 20th century. It is to Ramanujan’s credit that the exceptionally efficient ways of calculating ∏ (pi) that he developed were later incorporated in computer algorithms.
The performance was followed by a discussion in which the august audience of about 600 academics participated. The discussion was led by Prof. Aichelburg of the faculty of mathematics, Technical University, Vienna. The play will be shown until late October.
Simon McBurney
Simon McBurney, who is renowned for creating spectacular multilayered theater worlds in which the past plays a key role in illuminating the present and who became famous three years ago with the staging of The Noise of Time, is presenting A Disappearing Number simultaneously in London, Vienna, Amsterdam and at the Royal Theatre of Plymouth. It is a Complicite, London, production, done in collaboration with barbican – bite, another theater group in London, and Wiener Festwochen, Vienna.
Preparations are also under way, by the Alter Ego Productions, for an Off-Broadway staging of David Freeman’s A First Class Man. Freeman’s book revolves around Ramanujan’s complex relationship with Prof. Hardy. In addition, Stephen Fry and Dev Benegal have already begun shooting, as co-directors, a film on Ramanujan’s life in Tamil Nadu and Cambridge. Another film, based on Robert Kanigel’s book, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of Genius Ramanujan, is also under production, this one by Edward Pressman and Mathew Brown.
The play that is being shown in Vienna and elsewhere and the films, when they are screened, are bound to offer new challenges to dozens of associations named after Ramanujan to further elaborate his work. In several instances, he has left behind only solutions to many mathematical problems he tackled. As he was too poor to buy paper, he could not record the prodigious work put in before he arrived at those solutions. Poverty obliged him to use slate and chalk. Every time an exercise was completed, he erased it to start a new one.
(Kulamarva Balakrishana is a freelance journalist and social activist. Now in semi-retirement, he divides his time between India and Austria. This theater review was filed from the Austrian capital, Vienna.)
[Published on July 28, 2007.]
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Reader's Response
More Than a Theater Review
Through this review I came
to know several facts about the late Ramanujan which, in spite of being an
Indian, I did not know before. Especially this one: "In several instances, he
has left behind only solutions to many mathematical problems he tackled. As he
was too poor to buy paper, he could not record the prodigious work put in before
he arrived at those solutions. Poverty obliged him to use slate and chalk. Every
time an exercise was completed, he erased it to start a new one."
It is a nice work. Veteran journalist Balakrishna has given more insight on
Ramanujan's life than just a theater review so that Westerners as well as
Easterners may know more about this great but poor Indian mathematician.
Kadengodlu Shankara Bhat J.
Atyrau City, Republic of Kazakhstan
July 29, 2007