Hard sums

   Confession time: I've skipped bits of this book!! The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt is about a number of mathematicians, and it has equations and things here and there, and I didn't even begin to try to understand them as I have no time just now (and doubtless not enough knowledge anyway), but that apart, it is a fascinating insight into a very cerebral world.
   Set in Cambridge just before and during the first world war, it's a stark portrait of a time and place, and more importantly, of a group of brilliant individuals, foremost among them being the Indian clerk of the title, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a man of little formal education and great genius who comes to Trinity College from Madras at the behest of the famous Hardy and Littlewood.
    A couple of passages struck me for what appears to be their summing up of this unusual breed of men and their work:

"....unlike Littlewood or Bohr or...any other great mathematician whom Hardy has known, [Neville] is happy. Almost carefree. Perhaps this is why he will never amount to anything. He does not embrace solitude, much less suffering. He loves the world too much".
and,
"All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That's the biggest paradox of all - all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell".

    Whether it's the maths or the war or their personal frustrations, and with the possible exception of Neville (above) what an unhappy bunch they all were, and how guarded their personalities seem. Still, it's an extremely detailed, densely written account, which reads very true and is highly illuminating.

Comments

[Dark Puss]

Your first quotation from the book has the ring of truth about it. I embrace solitude far less than I used to and it is indeed fortunate that my non-physics skills are these days of value. During my PhD, loving the world was a distraction and had to be sacrificed on many occasions.

[Georgia K]

I read this book a few months ago. Ramanujan having never been fully embraced by these unhappy and utterly tedious people, I thought it rather sad that Leavitt did a pretty fair job of sidelining him too. Best exemplified, perhaps, by his treatment of Ramanujan's suicide attempt, which was rendered as a negotiation between Hardy and the local constabulary after the event. Such a desperate act, and what do we really learn of how he reached such a point? Not a lot. Throughout the book, we only experience Ramanujan through the perceptions of others - Leavitt completely fails to give him a voice. Disappointing.

[Cornflower]

It is very much Hardy's book, isn't it? Despite its shortcomings - and it is rather grim -  I found it extremely interesting. I wonder whether enough is known of Ramanujan to have given him more of a voice, and if so, it is then quite deliberate and 'appropriate' that what is necessarily his elusive character is only seen obliquely through others' eyes.

[Simon S]

Ahhh you finished your copy before me! I actually havent started it yet as The 19th Wife (very good) kept me reading solely it for most of the week and am now on Mr Toppit, what are you reading next?

[Georgia K]

That may well be the reason, Karen, but then why sell the book as Ramanujan's story? Take him out of it altogether, and what are you actually left with? A proficiently executed portrait of time and place indeed, but haven't we read all of this before, in one form or another? We may not have read the mathematics story, but then you yourself admit to giving up on that – and I very much doubt you are alone!

I had never heard of Ramanujan before I picked up this book. But the bare bones of his story filled me with wonder as to what it must have been like for him – self-taught, of no social standing and, in the full flush of the British empire, Indian to boot – to arrive not just in England but in one of the most daunting communities England had to offer, given his aspirations. What did he make of it? How did he cope? At the end of the book I was none the wiser really, which struck me as such a missed opportunity.

Or a failure of Leavitt's imagination?

[Dark Puss]

Dear Georgia K and Cornflower, I am glad you are fascinated by Ramanujan's story. I suggest you take this book to your favourite charity shop and fill the space on your shelves with The Man Knew Infinity which is an excellent biography of Ramanujan written by Robert Kanigel. Hardy rated Ramanujan's ability much higher than his own and even higher than the great Hilbert but he wasn't in the slightest interested in the peron behind the talent.

[Georgia K]

I've just read the reviews on Amazon and that one does look interesting. Thanks for the tip.