Ramanujan had more creativity than most of us do

Updated on: Friday, May 27, 2011

A remarkable feature of Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was his ability to take small strands of knowledge and expand them into long highways, Bruce Berndt, American mathematician and an authority on Ramanujan said on Tuesday.

Delivering the Alladi Centenary Foundation lecture organised at “Ekamra Nivas” ancestral home in Chennai of another outstanding mathematician Alladi Ramakrishnan, Prof. Berndt said while most ordinary mathematicians would be satisfied with making small steps with the little they knew, Ramanujam could make long strides and construct entire information highways even while leaving scope for others to build other structures around these pathways.

Prof. Berndt, who is mathematics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign, U.S., cited the observation of prominent mathematician Freeman Dyson that the wonderful thing about Ramanujan was that “he discovered so much and yet left so much more for others in his garden.”

In an address themed, “Ramanujan's Notebooks, his Lost Notebook, and his creativity,” Prof. Berndt said while Ramanujan structured his arguments and proofs like any other mathematician, “he had more creativity than most of us do.”

While some would say he worked by intuition, Ramanujan did work on a lot of calculations like any mathematician and his proofs were rigorous, he said.

The element of surprise in Ramanujan's work had something to do with his creative thinking, according to Prof. Berndt. The mathematical genius could “make connections between areas of mathematics that we didn't know existed.” In fact, many of his results in the early notebooks would never ever have been discovered, he said. Stating that Ramanujan was ahead of his time, Prof. Berndt noted that it was unfortunate that many among the elite mathematicians in India still think of him as “old-fashioned.” While there are pockets such as Chennai, Mysore, Bangalore and Chandigarh where Ramunajan continues to be revered and appreciated, the mathematician's work has not been much of an influence on the elite. “Consequently, Ph.D. students are generally not persuaded into areas of mathematics popularised by Ramunujan,” he said. At Illinois, for example, there has been only one Indian student among the 70 Ph.D. students who researched on Ramanujan.

Krishnaswami Alladi, Editor-in-Chief of “The Ramanujan Journal,” who presented Prof. Berndt with a book “The Legacy of Alladi Ramakrishnan in the mathematical sciences,” said a special volume of the journal would be brought out in December to coincide with the 125th birth anniversary celebrations of Ramanujan.

Ramanujan had more creativity than most of us do

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