Teach'em young

SURESH RAM has done us all a great service by coming up with this short biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest pure mathematicians the world has ever seen. The book is quite readable, and more importantly, highly affordable.

The famous "1729" incident involving Ramanujan and his mentor Hardy is recounted early on in the book. Hardy, who was visiting Ramanujan as the latter lay dying in a hospital in Putney, said that the taxi by which he had come had the extremely uninteresting number 1729. At once Ramanujan perked up and said that on the contrary, it was an extremely interesting number. He said 1729 was the smallest number which could be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways, viz. 1729 = 103 + 93 and 1729 = 123 + 13. This single incident is enough to give us an insight into the puissance of Ramanujan's mind. Small wonder that Littlewood (who along with Hardy had discovered the genius in Ramanujan) remarked that "every positive integer was a personal friend of Ramanujan."

The first few chapters give us an insight into Ramanujan's personality and early life. The years of abject penury and unrelenting toil are movingly narrated. The author has also given us an idea of the contribution that Ramanujan's contemporaries made towards his career.

The wonderful thing about Ramanujan was that in spite of his difficulties, he never once bemoaned his fate. If he did not have the money to buy notebooks for doing his mathematics, he would collect packing paper from the streets and go about his work. Years later, when he was awarded scholarships from both Cambridge and Madras universities, he communicated to them that after setting aside a sum of money for his parents and for himself, they were to use the rest to pay for the education of poor students. The great mathematician comes through as a simple man who enjoyed swapping funny stories from time to time.

The last chapter is devoted to Ramanujan's wife, Janakiammal, who stood by him like the proverbial rock. Ramanujan was deeply attached to her, and resisted the attempts of his mother to drive a wedge between them. But for her principled stand, we would not have had access to his notebooks today, as his relatives had plans to sell his notebooks to the highest bidder.

The main drawback, if I might say so, is that the book does not contain any mathematics at all. A few of his theorems together with the proofs would have stimulated mathematically inclined youngsters. For all you know, this might provide the spark in a bright young mind and encourage him to take up mathematics as a career. An index would have been extremely helpful.

Inventors Who Revolutionised our Lives by K. V. Gopalakrishnan is a book which any person interested in science would be well advised to buy. the author distinguishes between the scientist and the inventor by saying that a scientist is one who does research because he delights in the pursuit of knowledge, whereas an inventor is driven by the desire to achieve some socially useful objective. While this sounds quite utopian, it certainly does bring out the differences in outlook between the inventor and the scientist.

An interesting point raised in the book is that inventions do not always follow scientific discoveries. To give a few examples, James Watt built his engines before the science of thermodynamics was developed, and Faraday invented the motor and generator before James Clerk Maxwell published his theory of electromagnetism. This goes to show that truly great inventors are born, not made. They have the ability to visualise how a system will work before it is actually built. The biographies of the inventors are crisp, and make for very pleasant reading. Each piece brings out the genius of the man, as well as his foibles and idiosyncrasies.

These two books must be made a part of the libraries of our schools, for it is only here that future Edisons and Ramanujans and Faradays will be made.

RAMDAS MENON

Srinivasa Ramanujan, Suresh Ram, NBT, p.84, Rs. 25.

Inventors Who Revolutionised our Lives, K. V. Gopalakrishnan, NBT, p.152, Rs. 35.

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