26, 94

You may not be able to make out what the numbers mean, but that's nothing to be worried about. Even as great a mathematician as G.H. Hardy, who specialized in number theory, was not a numbers man. In that way, he was unlike Srinivasa Ramanujan, for whom numbers were his "personal friends". There is a story about Hardy visiting a very ill Ramanujan at Putney; getting into the room, Hardy mentioned that he had travelled in taxicab number 1729, which seemed to him a "rather dull number". Ramanujan, however, was instantly animated. "No, no, not at all", he said. "It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways". 

Since then, such numbers have been known as 'Taxicab Numbers'; you can head out here to see some of them, as well as a picture of.... well, something like taxicab number 1729. The story however is just one more example of how the man was completely un-fathomable, even for those who knew what he was talking about. What could he have achieved if he had lived longer than he actually did? 

Ramanujan passed into immortality this day in 1920. And yet, there are many who still don't know about him, or what he did. We go past all these mentions about the greatest mathematician of modern India with reverence, because it is too taxing to try and figure out what was it that he did. This day is marked with special events by the Ramanujan museum in Chennai. I haven't been there yet, but for today, this bust of Ramanujan at the IIT Madras should remind us of his memory!

  

Not a memorial

It should have been, but it is not. But it is from this spot that a 25-year old Iyengar made preparations to lose his caste, trading it for a chance to do the one thing he loved. Srinivasa Ramanujan moved to this part of Triplicane, Hanumantharayan Koil Street, sometime in May 1913. He had been granted a scholarship by the University of Madras, and leave from the Madras Port Trust. All he had to do was mathematics, and to submit a quarterly report on his progress.

And progress he did. Even though correspondence between him and Prof. Hardy over at Cambridge was strained and infrequent, it was all part of a larger plan that Hardy had set in motion. By the new year, Hardy's 'agent', E.H. Neville, a young Fellow of Trinity College was in Madras for a series of lectures on differential geometry. Whether those letters were a success or not, he managed to overcome Ramanujan's apprehensions about travelling to England. 

And so it was that the morning of March 17, 1914, saw the now kudumi-less Ramanujan waiting to board the S.S. Nevasa, with a second class ticket sent by Binny & Co. To see him off were some of Madras' elite: members of the judiciary, bench and bar, professors, colleagues and officers from the Madras Port Trust and members of the press, including Kasturiranga Iyengar of The Hindu. Neither his mother nor his wife were present, having been bundled off to Kumbakonam a few days earlier. A century later, let alone a memorial, not even a memory remains. Even the plaque that was on the premises earlier has disappeared!