Well, so much has been and is being written about the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. And why not? A genius deserves to be acknowledged and get his due for his geniousity. They say behind every successful man, there’s a lot of unsuccessful years. Ramanujan too had his share of trials and tribulations before achieving unimaginable heights of success in mathematics.
But to make the story complete and do full justice, is it also not important to acknowledge the woman behind this successful man? Though not much is known about her contribution to his success, but it can be imagined, and rightly so, that without her sacrifice, this mathematical genius would not have been able to fully focus on his theorems or immerse himself in his equations and come out with flying colours, especially during his stint in Cambridge (1914-1919).
When Ramanujan was to leave for Cambridge, Janaki expresses her desire to come along with him to England. But her wish was rejected outright and she had to stay back in India all alone during the World War I days. In a way it helped Ramanujan to focus fully on maths in England and realise his dream. This slightly reminds one of the great Urmila – Lakshmana’s wife in Ramayana – whose sacrifice not to go to exile along with her husband so that Lakshmana can serve his elder brother Lord Rama wholeheartedly in the wild without any distractions.
Janaki (Janakiammal) was born on March 21, 1899. She was the daughter of Rangaswamy Iyengar and Ranganayaki Ammal who altogether had six children (five daughters and a son). Janaki was the fourth daughter of the couple, who belonged to Rajendram, a village close to Marudur Railway Station (Karur district).
Ranganayaki Ammal was a friend of Ramanujam’s mother, Komalathammal, who on a visit to Rajendram saw Janaki who was only 9 at that time and asked for her hand in marriage to her 21-year-old son Ramanujam.
Ramanujan and Janaki tied the knot on July 14, 1909.
The son of a sari store clerk and a homemaker, Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode (Tamil Nadu). He was raised in Kumbhakonam, which was his mother Komalathammal’s native place. He attended college hoping to pass the exam required to enter the University of Madras. But he was so absorbed in maths that he ignored other subjects and flunked the exam. He never earned a bachelor’s degree.
The mathematicians in Madras (now Chennai) persuaded Ramanujan to contact experts in England to evaluate his work, but because of his lack of formal education, he was not taken seriously.
Janaki joined her husband after coming of age in 1912. In the meantime, Ramanujan got a clerical job in the Madras Port Trust. The chief accountant of the port trust, S Narayana Rao, was a mathematician. Both he and Sir Francis Spring, the chairman of the port trust, took a keen interest in Ramanujan’s mathematical talents.
The turning point came in 1913 when Ramanujan sent a letter to G H Hardy, a renowned mathematics professor at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In the letter, he submitted about 120 mathematical theorems without showing the details of how he had acquired the results. “I had never seen anything like them before. A single look at them was enough to show that they could be written by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them,” Hardy wrote back.
Professor Bruce C Berndt spent 22 years trying to prove the 3,254 theorems in Ramanujan's three notebooks and the “lost notebook” – a set of pages Janaki gathered together from their Indian home after his death. He has said that “some of Ramanujan's maths is simply startling. If he had not discovered them, nobody ever would have.”
Hardy invited Ramanujan to come to Cambridge for further study. Hardy and his colleague, J E Littlewood, went out of the way to admit Ramanujan to Cambridge University, despite his lack of a degree in mathematics.
There was also opposition to Ramanujan’s going abroad given his strict religious background. Some say his mother had a dream in which the Goddess Namagiri ordered her not to come in the way of her son’s goals.
Ramanujan arrived at Cambridge in 1914. He published many new results on topics such as the number theory, infinite series and indefinite integrals. One of the most spectacular results in mathematics is the Hardy-Ramanujan formula derived in 1917 for the number of partitions of an integer.
Ramanujam was awarded a degree from Cambridge in 1916 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1919.
Ramanujan was alone in England for almost five years (April 14, 1914, to February 27, 1919). In between he fell ill and was treated for tuberculosis (TB) in 1917.
Hardy visited Ramanujan at the nursing home where he was recuperating from TB and said, “I thought the number of my taxicab was 1729, it seemed to me a rather dull number.”
Ramanujan replied: “No Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
World War I prevented Janaki from joining Ramanujan to take care of him. After the war Ramanujan returned to India in April 1919 making a mark for himself, although he was weak from prolonged confinement in hospitals. Janaki joined him in Madras and nursed him till his untimely death on April 26, 1920.
Janaki kept all his loose notes in order, and on his death dutifully delivered them to the University of Madras.
Ramanujan once told Janaki that his name would be known in 100 years' time – and in the last decades of her life she began to see this prediction coming true. Thanks to her, the notes she had kept turned up in Cambridge 60 years after Ramanujan's passing away. In 1987, the then Indian PM, Rajiv Gandhi, presented her with her own a copy of the “lost notebook”.
A postage stamp commemorating his 75th birth anniversary was issued in 1962.
After Ramanujan’s death, Janaki was happy to state: “I considered it my good fortune to give him rice, lemon juice, butter milk, etc., at regular intervals and to give fomentation to his legs and chest when he reported pain. The two vessels used then for preparing hot water are alone still with me; these remind me often of those days.”
In 1950, one of her friends, Soundaravalli, died suddenly entrusting her with her 7-year-old son, W Narayanan. Janaki brought him up and became a foster mother to him. Narayanan took voluntary retirement from State Bank of India in 1988, about 6 years before Janaki passed away, to take care of her health. Janaki breathed her last on the morning of April 13, 1994, at her residence in Triplicane, Chennai, at the age of 94.
Janaki also supported financially the education of several children
and many youngsters.
Well, a woman can be behind a man’s success, have impact on him: motivate him, support him, sacrifice for him so he could do whatever he wants. Very difficult to gauge what was (and how much was) Janaki’s contribution in shaping this mathematical genius from India but yes, she was undeniably the woman behind this successful man.
Small wonder, they say behind a successful man there is a proud, sacrificing wife.
A person’s success depends only on him/her; on how hard he/she works in order to achieve whatever he’s/she’s aiming for.
Ramanujan was truly a genius. Ramanujan used to say that his insights came from Goddess Lakshmi who, he claimed, visited him in dreams and wrote equations on his tongue. This is nothing but sheer modesty, because genius is, they say, 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. He may have got inspiration from his family Goddess Lakshmi but his mathematical achievement was all hard work.
Robert Kanigel, Ramanujan’s biographer, says: “Forget all the talk of his religious inspiration. The truth is he just worked hard.”
Robert Kanigel book on Ramanujan is called “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, which has now been made into a film. Dev Patel portrays the role of Srinivasa Ramanujan, while Devika Bhise plays the role of Janaki.
The Times
