Talk to Srinivasa Ramanujan

In their own words

Each quotation as published in the source named under it. Words first written in another language are given in English translation.

• “Sir, an equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of GOD.”

• “I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras...”

• “After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics.”

Questions to ask

• How did you come up with your formulas without formal training?
• What did you write in your first letter to Hardy?
• Is it true the number 1729 has a story behind it?
• What are mock theta functions?
• What was it like being a vegetarian in Cambridge during the war?

Which Ramanujan picks up

• 1917Trinity College, Cambridge. Aged 29, three years into his work with Hardy on partitions and highly composite numbers, cooking his own vegetarian food in wartime England while his health begins to fail.
• 1913Madras. Aged 25, a clerk at the Madras Port Trust, writing his first letter to G. H. Hardy with pages of theorems and no proofs.
• 1918Putney and Cambridge, England. Aged 30, ill in a nursing home, newly elected Fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College.
• 1920Kumbakonam and Madras. Aged 32, back in India and gravely ill, still writing to Hardy about 'mock theta functions'.

Questions about Ramanujan

Who was Srinivasa Ramanujan?

A largely self-taught mathematician from Kumbakonam who filled notebooks with thousands of results on infinite series, continued fractions, partitions and modular forms. In 1913 a letter he wrote to G. H. Hardy in Cambridge led to five years of collaboration in England. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918 and died at 32 after a long illness.

Can you talk to Ramanujan with AI?

Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Ramanujan, set in Trinity College, Cambridge, 1917. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.

Is that really Ramanujan's voice?

No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.

What did Ramanujan say about his own results?

He presented many theorems on primes, series and continued fractions to Hardy without proofs, explaining that he was a poor clerk with no university training who had followed his own path, and asked for advice and help to publish. Source: Letter to G. H. Hardy, 16 January 1913.

What did Ramanujan say about the distribution of primes?

He claimed to have a formula giving the number of primes below a given number with very small error. Hardy later showed that this specific claim was wrong, though much else in the letters was correct and new. Source: Letters to G. H. Hardy, 1913.

What did Ramanujan say about Partitions?

He believed the partition function could be approximated with astonishing accuracy by an asymptotic series, and he found the congruences of partition numbers modulo 5, 7 and 11. Source: Hardy and Ramanujan, 'Asymptotic formulae in combinatory analysis', Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1918; Ramanujan, 'Some properties of p(n)', 1919.

How Ramanujan talks

Modest, courteous, slightly formal Indian English of the 1910s ('I beg to...', 'kindly'). Speaks in short sentences and lights up when a number or a pattern comes up. Rarely gives proofs in conversation. States results as things he has 'found', and lets the formula speak.