Lives and Families
The Training Nobody Counts
Srinivasa Ramanujan is remembered as the untaught genius who received formulas from a goddess in his sleep. He said something close to that himself. But the book that shaped him, the examinations he failed, the marriage arranged when his wife was a child, and the diagnosis nobody made are all on the record — and together they are a stranger story than the one about dreams.
The myth
The story is told as the purest case of genius there is. A poor clerk in Madras, with no university degree and no mathematical training worth the name, filled notebooks with formulas nobody had seen. He could not prove them and did not much try. Asked where they came from, he said the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal revealed them to him in his sleep — wrote them, in some tellings, on his tongue. He posted a sample to a Cambridge don, G. H. Hardy, who read them and understood at once that no ordinary person could have invented such things. Hardy brought him to England, the world discovered him, and he died young, having received his mathematics rather than derived it.
Almost every element of that is either true or was said by Ramanujan himself, which is precisely why it is difficult to dislodge. This is not a myth invented by outsiders and imposed on a foreign subject. Ramanujan was an observant Hindu who worshipped Namagiri, and he told people that his results came to him through her. The myth is his.
What the myth leaves out is everything that happened around the mathematics — and the surrounding life turns out to explain the mathematics better than the goddess does.
The book that taught him to skip the proofs
At about sixteen, Ramanujan came across A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, compiled by George Shoobridge Carr and published in the 1880s. It is not a textbook in any modern sense. It is a compressed list of roughly five thousand theorems, assembled as a cram aid for Cambridge examinations, stating results with condensed proofs or none at all.
That format is the single most important fact about Ramanujan's education, and it is usually mentioned in passing as evidence that he had almost nothing to learn from. The opposite reading is more useful. A book of five thousand naked results is not an absence of training; it is an unusual and demanding kind of training. It presents mathematics as a landscape of true statements and leaves the reader to find the road to each one. Ramanujan worked through it and derived the results himself.
Consider what that does to a young mathematician's sense of what mathematics looks like. The thing everyone finds strange about Ramanujan's notebooks — page after page of astonishing identities with no derivations — is the form of the book he learned from. He wrote mathematics the way the mathematics he had read was written. The habit that made him seem to receive results rather than obtain them is, on the documentary record, a stylistic inheritance from a Victorian exam crammer.
Hardy's own reaction to the first letter is often quoted, and it is worth quoting accurately, because it says something specific. The theorems, Hardy wrote, must be true, "because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them." That is not a statement about divine transmission. It is a professional judgement about the difficulty of fabricating results of that shape — the remark of a man who has spent his life watching people fail to make up good mathematics.
The examinations he failed, and what he failed at
Ramanujan passed his matriculation examination in 1904 and entered the Government Arts College at Kumbakonam on the Junior Subrahmanyam Scholarship. The F.A. — First Examination in Arts — required English, Sanskrit, mathematics, physiology, and the history of Rome and Greece. He gave his attention to mathematics and neglected the rest, failed the non-mathematical papers, and lost the scholarship.
This is the part of the record that the "untaught" framing quietly deletes, and it is not a small detail. Ramanujan was not excluded from formal education; he was inside it, repeatedly, and it did not hold him. The failure was specific and self-inflicted in a way that is recognisable to anyone who has ever loved one subject at the direct expense of four others. It also had consequences that were not academic at all: without a degree, he had no professional route into mathematics in colonial Madras, and no income.
In 1912 he took a clerkship at the Madras Port Trust. The salary is given as thirty rupees a month in some accounts and twenty-five in others; the sources disagree and this piece cannot resolve which is right. Either figure describes the same situation. The mathematics that Hardy would shortly call the work of a mathematician of the highest class was being done in the margins of a shipping office by a man who needed the job.
The marriage, the mother, and the letters
In July 1909 Ramanujan was married to Janaki, in a five-day double ceremony at Rajendram at which her elder sister Vijayalakshmi was also married. Janaki was about nine years old — she is described as barely nine, and elsewhere as ten. The marriage was arranged, as marriages were, and by the convention of the time and place she remained with her own parents until she reached puberty, joining Ramanujan in 1912 while he was at the Port Trust.
She was, then, roughly twelve or thirteen when the household began, and about fourteen when her husband sailed for England in 1914. She would outlive him by more than sixty years.
The episode that most deserves to be better known concerns the years he was away. According to Robert Kanigel's biography The Man Who Knew Infinity, Janaki wrote to Ramanujan in England repeatedly, handing the letters to his mother, Komalatammal, to be posted — and Komalatammal did not post them. Letters in the other direction did not reach Janaki either. Kanigel records that Ramanujan learned this from Janaki only after he returned to Madras.
Two cautions belong here. The account rests substantially on Janaki's own testimony, given long afterwards, and it has been dramatised in film in ways that have hardened it into something more vivid than the record supports. But the core claim — that the correspondence between a young husband abroad and his teenage wife was intercepted at home by his mother — is in the standard biography, and it reframes the whole English period. The isolation Ramanujan experienced at Trinity is usually attributed to climate, food, war and racism, all of which are documented. To that list belongs a silence from home that he had no way of knowing was manufactured.
The war, the diet, and the platform
Ramanujan was a strict vegetarian in Cambridge during the First World War. He cooked for himself. Wartime rationing and shortage made the ingredients of his diet difficult to obtain, and his health deteriorated across the English years.
In 1918 he attempted to kill himself by throwing himself in front of a train on the London Underground; Hardy intervened with the police on his behalf. The episode is recorded in Kanigel's biography and is not a matter of contemporary public record, having been kept quiet at the time — a fact worth stating plainly rather than presenting the incident with more certainty than its provenance carries.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College in the same period. Both things were true at once, which is the ordinary condition of a life and the thing hagiography is worst at holding.
The diagnosis nobody made
Ramanujan returned to India in 1919 and died on 26 April 1920, aged thirty-two. The cause given at the time, and repeated for most of a century, was tuberculosis. His doctors were reportedly never fully convinced of it.
In 1994 the physician D. A. B. Young reassessed the surviving medical evidence and concluded that the fatal illness was hepatic amoebiasis — a parasitic infection of the liver, following from dysentery Ramanujan had suffered in 1906, more than a decade before the terminal illness. Untreated amoebic dysentery can lie dormant for years before producing a liver abscess.
Young's explanation of the diagnostic failure is the part that matters, and it is not a story about incompetence. Hepatic amoebiasis "was regarded in 1918 as a tropical disease," and the specialists called to Ramanujan were experts in tuberculosis or in gastric medicine — not in tropical disease. Nor would a patient volunteer a bout of dysentery from eleven and eight years earlier as relevant to a present fever unless someone thought to ask. The condition, Young notes, still "presents a severe challenge to the diagnostic skills."
If Young is right — and this is a retrospective reading of an incomplete record, offered as the best available account rather than a certainty — then Ramanujan died of something treatable, misidentified because he had been moved four thousand miles from the medical context in which anyone would have thought to look for it.
Why the truth is the better story
The myth's appeal is that it removes the problem of explanation. If the formulas were given, there is nothing to account for, and nothing to be responsible for either.
The documented life will not do that. It offers, instead, a peculiar Victorian cram book that taught a teenager to see mathematics as a field of bare true statements; a scholarship lost to a physiology paper; a clerk's desk in a port office; a wife married at nine and abandoned to a silence her mother-in-law had constructed; a vegetarian starving slowly in a rationed country at war; a platform at an Underground station; and a parasite acquired at eighteen that killed him at thirty-two because the men at his bedside had been trained to look for something else.
None of that diminishes the mathematics, which remains as difficult to account for as it ever was. What it does is put the mathematics back inside a life, where it happened. The version with the goddess is a story about a channel. The version with the letters, the examinations and the amoeba is a story about a person — and it has the further merit of being checkable, which the dream is not.
Ramanujan believed Namagiri gave him the formulas. That belief is a fact about him and deserves to be reported as one. It is simply not the most interesting thing on the record about how he came to write them down.
On sources. Carr's A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, its approximate five thousand theorems, and its statement of results without proofs are standard in the biographical literature and are given here as summarised in general reference accounts of Ramanujan's education; the inference that its format shaped his own notebook style is this publication's reading, not a claim from a source. The matriculation of 1904, the Junior Subrahmanyam Scholarship at Government Arts College Kumbakonam, the F.A. subject list, the loss of the scholarship, and the 1912 Madras Port Trust clerkship are drawn from the Indian Mathematical Society's biographical account and general reference sources; the monthly salary is given as thirty rupees in some and twenty-five in others, and that discrepancy is unresolved here. The July 1909 double wedding at Rajendram, Janaki's age of about nine, and her joining the household in 1912 are from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences' Ramanujan pages. The interception of the couple's correspondence by Komalatammal is reported in Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991), and rests substantially on Janaki's own much later testimony; a 2014 film dramatised it, and the dramatisation should not be mistaken for the evidence. Hardy's remark that the theorems "must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them" is his own, widely reproduced from his accounts of the first letter. The 1918 suicide attempt on the Underground and Hardy's intervention are recorded in Kanigel and were suppressed at the time; there is no contemporary public record. The reassessment of the fatal illness as hepatic amoebiasis is D. A. B. Young's, published in 1994, as summarised on the Institute of Mathematical Sciences' Ramanujan medicography pages, from which the quoted phrases are taken; it is a retrospective diagnosis from an incomplete record and is presented as the best available account rather than as settled. Ramanujan's own attribution of his results to the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal is reported by his biographers and by his family, and is recorded here as his stated belief.