Kumbakonam to Cambridge: The Making of a Genius

The improbable arc of Srinivasa Ramanujan, from a Tamil temple town to Trinity College

How a self-taught clerk from Kumbakonam, educated almost entirely from a bad nineteenth-century British cram book, wrote a letter in 1913 that reached G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and changed modern mathematics. This lesson walks the journey from a boy with a borrowed trigonometry book to the voyage made possible by a village goddess's permission received in a mother's dream.

Kumbakonam to Cambridge: The Making of a Genius

Imagine the envelope. It is nine sheets of cheap Indian notepaper, sealed in Madras on 16 January 1913, addressed to Mr. G. H. Hardy, Trinity College, Cambridge. Inside are more than a hundred theorems written out in a careful but untrained hand. The sender is twenty-five years old. He earns twenty pounds per year as an accounts clerk at the Madras Port Trust. He has no university degree, has failed his college examinations twice, and has no formal training in the mathematics of the last three hundred years. His name is Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Hardy, who at the time was widely regarded as the finest pure mathematician in England, received the letter, glanced through it, and almost threw it away. The formulas were so strange and so bold that his first reaction was to suspect a hoax, or a crank, or a lazy copyist working from a book of published results. But something about the letter would not let him rest. That evening he showed it to J. E. Littlewood, his frequent collaborator, and the two men sat up past midnight trying to prove or disprove the claims. By the early hours they had reached a conclusion that Hardy would later write into the history of mathematics. The theorems had to be true, because, as he put it, no one could have the imagination to invent them. The unknown clerk in Madras was the real thing.

This is the story of how he got from one place to the other.

A Boy in Kumbakonam

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, and grew up in the temple town of Kumbakonam, where his father worked as a clerk in a sari shop. The family was Iyengar Brahmin, Śrīvaiṣṇava by tradition, and poor. They lived in a small house on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street, next to the great Sārangapāṇi temple whose gopuram Ramanujan could see from his doorstep every morning. His mother, Komalatammal, was the unshakable center of the household. She sang devotional songs in the temple, managed the family's religious life, and raised her son on a steady diet of Vaiṣṇava piety and stubborn conviction that he was meant for something large.