All my life I could do mathematics. At five I was better than what is now the top end of GCSE which is the examination generally taken by sixteen year olds. At nine I had gone beyond Advanced level taken by eighteen year olds, and I was far better at thirteen than any of my teachers. I was regularly accused of cheating for producing answers mentally in seconds that took others hours to produce, and my own work was regarded as gibberish. I was punished once for flippantly remarking that it wasn’t my fault that my teachers weren’t fluent in Gibber and so couldn’t follow my line of reasoning. I hasten to add that I take no pride in this. I was what I was given. No one blames a child with intellectual short comings for their inabilities, nor should they. I refuse to use the phrase special needs, for the gifted have special needs too, probably all do. No more should anyone credit a child with exceptional abilities, for they are given, not deserved. I was simply lucky and unlucky in the roulette that is genetics. How was I unlucky? Well both my parents were brilliant academics, but deeply flawed personalities, and I inherited both their brains and all their flaws.

I always felt that I had no spiritual place to be as a mathematician. I didn’t do mathematics like other mathematicians, and I got a lot of criticism about it from pedlars of the lower level works of others, teachers they’re called. Even though the criticism was coming from those who could never call themselves mathematicians, I felt lessened, second class by their words. Then in my mid teens I read The Man Who Knew Infinity, a book about the life and work of Shri Nivasa Ramanujan. I was not on my own any more. I had respectability in my own eyes and the hell to the rest of them because I could quote his way which was my way too. I felt empowered. It was that that enabled me to apply to the Steklov Institut from where I ultimately achieved academician status, a polymath the equal of any on the planet.

Ramanujan was a big man, very dark skinned and of huge bulk for a Calcutta slum boy and of powerful intellect. His eyes were curiously humble yet deeply set and piercingly questioning. I never met him you understand, for he had died long before I was born, but I read everything there was to read of him and studied dozens of images, I felt I knew him through the writings of Hardy of Cambridge. Ramanujan’s legacy, especially his notebooks, was my mentor. Alas Hardy too died long before I was born, so much I had was at second or third hand. I was lucky enough to obtain copies of all Ramanujan’s work including the ‘lost’ notebook, via the kind offices of various persons. The picture used on Indian postage stamps makes him look very fat in the face which he wasn’t, but I didn’t care about what he looked like, he was Ramanujan, and all who counted in the world of mathematics knew what that meant.

Ramanujan couldn’t cope with cold. Calcutta was never cold. Cambridge was both cold and damp. For many years it was believed he died aged just thirty-two from TB, though various sources state his death from the age of twenty-nine to thirty-three. It is now believed he died from hepatic amoebiasis which was being successfully treated at the time of his death. Few people came to know him because when he was at Cambridge the university was empty, the young men were away busy dying in the trenches of the First World War. He was a complex mixture of genius and naïveté. When someone left the window of his room open he had no idea how to close it, and he was not aware that one was supposed to get under the blankets on a bed. He was also a shy and proud man and would not ask for help.

There is material in his note books still not understood, and he didn’t have the time to explain. I have regretted since I first discovered his existence that I had not had the chance to collaborate with him because I think it not arrogant to say that we could both have benefited from that. I can justify that last statement by reference to my publications in which I have explained some of his previously not understood work and to the volumes of material I added to it taking it forward.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is required reading for all students who takes one of my advanced post graduate courses, and they have to convince me they appreciate Ramanujan’s significance to mathematics today or they fail.