“Except for math he did poorly in all his subjects, but in physiology he reached particularly impressive lows, often scoring less than 10 percent on exams. He’d take the three-hour math exam and finish it in thirty minutes. But that got him exactly nowhere. In December 1906, he appeared again for the F.A. examination and failed. The following year, he took it again. And failed again.
Government College, Kumbakonam, 1904 and 1905 . . . Pachaiyappa’s College, Madras, 1906 and 1907 . . . In the first decade of the twentieth century, there was no room for Srinivasa Ramanujan in the higher education system of South India. He was gifted, and everyone knew it. But that hardly sufficed to keep him in school or get him a degree.
The System wouldn’t budge.
**
“To bring in money, Ramanujan approached friends of the family; perhaps they had accounts to post, or books to reconcile? Or a son to tutor? One student, for seven rupees a month, was Viswanatha Sastri, son of a Government College philosophy professor. Early each morning, Ramanujan would walk to the boy’s house on Solaiappa Mudali Street, at the other end of town, to coach him in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. The only trouble was, he couldn’t stick to the course material. He’d teach the standard method today and then, if Viswanatha forgot it, would improvise a wholly new one tomorrow. Soon he’d be lost in areas the boy’s regular teacher never touched.
Sometimes he would fly off onto philosophical tangents. They’d be discussing the height of a wall, perhaps for a trigonometry problem, and Ramanujan would insist that its height was, of course, only relative: who could say how high it seemed to an ant or a buffalo? One time he asked how the world would look when first created, before there was anyone to view it. He took delight, too, in posing sly little problems: If you take a belt, he asked Viswanatha and his father, and cinch it tight around the earth’s twenty-five-thousand-mile-long equator, then let it out just 2π feet—about two yards—how far off the earth’s surface would it stand? Some tiny fraction of an inch? Nope, one foot.”
“Viswanatha Sastri found Ramanujan inspiring; other students, however, did not. One classmate from high school, N. Govindaraja Iyengar, asked Ramanujan to help him with differential calculus for his B.A. exam. The arrangement lasted all of two weeks. You can think of calculus as a set of powerful mathematical tools; that’s how most students learn it and what most exams require. Or else you can appreciate it for the subtle questions it poses about the nature of the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. Ramanujan, either unmindful of his students’ practical needs or unwilling to cater to them, stressed the latter. “He would talk only of infinity and infinitesimals,” wrote Govindaraja, who was no slouch intellectually and wound up as chairman of India’s public service commission. “I felt that his tuition [teaching] might not be of real use to me in the examination, and so I gave it up.”
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.”
