10 Quotes by Robert Kanigel

Viewed one way, then, for at least five years between 1904 and 1909, Ramanujan floundered- mostly out of school, without a degree, without contact with other mathematicians. And yet, was the cup half-empty or half-full?

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package.

Ramanujan had lost all his scholarships. He had failed in school. Even as a tutor of the subject he loved most, he'd been found wanting.He had nothing.And yet, viewed a little differently, he had everything. For now there was nothing to distract him from his notebooks- notebooks, crammed with theorems, that each day, each week, bulged wider.

His academic failure forced him to develop unconventionally, free of the social straightjacket that might have constrained his progress to well-worn paths.

He received no guidance, no stimulation, no money beyond the few rupees he made from tutoring. But for all the economic deadweight he represented, his family apparently discouraged him little- not enough, in any case, to stop him.

But what Ramanujan wanted more, more than anything, was simply the freedom to do as he wished, to be left alone to think, to dream, to create, to lose himself in a world of his own making.

Don’t be so easy on yourself, it said.

They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.