As World War I heated up and Cambridge grew cold, Srinivasa Ramanujan huddled under his bedspread with an overcoat on (and a shawl for good measure).
Cambridge in 1914 was a place where you never knew which doyen of what subject you would meet in a chance encounter. Another student from India, who would go on to found the Indian Statistical Institute, made a friendship with Ramanujan. After many meetings, he found that the prodigy mathematician from South India had yet to figure out the way blankets are laid in British beds – tucked underneath a duvet.
Ramanujan (1887-1920) was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, but he needed to be tucked into bed on occasion. His health was poor, and England worsened it. He was believed to have caught tuberculosis – a condition that would kill him just a year after his long-awaited return to India, at the age of 32. It was later diagnosed as Amoebiasis – treatable even at the time.
More than a century after his birth, his life began to inspire the silver screen – and thereafter, millions. It’s rare for a mathematician to have inspired so much art: books have been written of him, poems penned, songs composed, plays performed and films and documentaries shot. After all, the material was rich – a rags to (intellectual) riches story of a young man from Erode, Madras Presidency, who without any formal training, shook the word of advanced mathematics in one of its academic centres at Cambridge.
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