In 2009 I stumbled upon the biography of S. Ramanujan (“The Man Who Knew Infinity”) while browsing the sidewalk display of the used-book store in my town. Having majored in Mathematics I had, of course, heard of Ramanujan. All I knew about him was the story involving his “friend” Hardy:
An ill Ramanujan lay in bed at the hospital in England and his friend Hardy came to visit him.
“Tell me something interesting”, said Ramanujan. “I have been lying in bed for days and days and I am bored.”
“I have nothing,” said Hardy. “Even the number of the cab was uninteresting… it was 1729.”
“That’s not uninteresting at all… it is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes!”
This story was probably passed down in college mathematics classes as a way to illustrate Ramanujan’s numeric prowess. No attention was paid to how he happened to be in a hospital in England, what happened to him after the hospital stay, what was the importance (if any) of the mathematics that he practiced. Neither was there any discussion of who this Hardy fellow was and how he had become acquainted with Ramanujan, or of his reaction (if any) to being told the strange distinction of the number 1,729.
I was drawn to the book because I knew the story. Little did I know that the book would open whole new vistas of reflection, insight and purpose.
While I enjoyed the book because it was a terrific story told in a sympathetic and engrossing way, the real payoff was that it put me in touch with parts of myself that I had forgotten.
The book made an enormous impression on me and I wrote a note to the author, Robert Kanigel (who was then a professor at MIT), telling him that I had found a great deal of meaning and resonance in his book. As I wrote the closing, a name popped into my head–it was a name that I had not even thought of in over thirty years. I mentioned that there is another person whose story is just as fascinating and deserves to be researched and told.
That person was Dr. Anandi-bai Joshee.
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I cannot help wondering… would I have thought of Anandi if I had not read The Man Who Knew Infinity? Would I have thought of Anandi if I had not spent a few minutes in the “zone” — deeply engrossed in describing why the book resonated with me? Most important, would I have considered taking on this enormous project, if Prof. Kanigel had not brilliantly shown the payoff of such an endeavor?