On December 22, 1887, a child was born in Madras, India, one of many in a country of, at the time, nearly 300 million people. He was given the name Ramanujan - meaning ‘the brother of Rama,’ a Hindu deity. But this was not just any child.
Before he hit puberty, Ramanujan had become a mathematical prodigy almost totally by accident. By the age of 11, he had exhausted and surpassed the knowledge of two college students who happened to be boarding with his family. At 13, he mastered advanced trigonometry without a teacher, alone, from a book someone had lent him, and began creating his own theorems. At 16, he stumbled by chance across a copy of G.S. Carr’s seminal work A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics and began to work through its 5000 theorems. The next year, Ramanujan independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant to fifteen decimal places, completing as a teenager and without mentorship what the world’s greatest mathematical minds had painstakingly accomplished over centuries.
In January of 1913, famed British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy received an unusual letter in the mail. It began, Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. It then presented seemingly outrageous claims that its author had made startling progress on a theory of divergent series in mathematics and had solved a well-established problem of the distribution of prime numbers. As a prominent mathematician, it was not rare for Hardy to receive letters from fanatics and crackpots, making ridiculous claims and wild assertions.
At first glance, this appeared to fit the bill. Yet, as Hardy began to look more closely, he quickly realized that this letter was something completely different. Over ten pages, the letter contained 120 advanced mathematical theorems;
some, Hardy realized, seemed to be independent rediscoveries of concepts already proven, while others appeared entirely groundbreaking, baffling even the great Hardy. After showing the letter to his colleague, John Edensor Littlewoods,
Hardy concluded the results must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.
Immediately, he surmised the letter must have been written by a mathematician of the highest ability, some sort of genius like Euler or Jacobi. Only one question remained: Who was this mystery man, this Indian clerk making £20 a year?
How was it possible that this total unknown had reached and even surpassed the greatest mathematical minds in the world?
On December 22, 1887, a child was born in Madras, India, one of many in a country of, at the time, nearly 300 million people. He was given the name Ramanujan meaning, the brother of Rama, a Hindu deity. But this was not just any child. Before he hit puberty, Srinivasa Ramanujan had become a mathematical prodigy almost totally by accident. By the age of 11, he had exhausted and surpassed the knowledge of two college students who happened to be boarding with his family. At 13, he mastered advanced trigonometry without a teacher, alone, from a book someone had lent him, and began creating his own theorems. At 16, he stumbled by chance across a copy of George Shoo bridge Carr’s seminal work A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics and began to work through its 5000 theorems.
The next year, Ramanujan independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant to fifteen decimal places, completing as a teenager and without mentorship what the world’s greatest mathematical minds had painstakingly accomplished over centuries. His peers and schoolmates said they rarely understood him, and that rather they simply stood in respectful awe. The headmaster of his school, while presenting him with a mathematics award, said Ramanujan deserved a score higher than the maximum. In recognition of his obvious ability, Ramanujan received a scholarship when he completed high school to study at the prestigious Government Arts College, Kumbakonam.
But once he was there, he could focus on nothing but math, failing most of his other courses in the process and seeing his scholarship revoked. He would leave school then return, then leave again, before taking a job as a low-level government clerk. Through it all, he pursued independent mathematical research at every opportunity, often living in poverty and on the brink of starvation, sustained only by his inherent brilliance. It may have been that this was where the story of Ramanujan ended, unknown and undiscovered in some dusty office buried under a clerks minutiae. It may have been this way, were it not for a letter he wrote in 1913 to G.H. Hardy. It was Hardy, having rescued Ramanujans letter from the literal and figurative dustbin of history, who was thankfully open-minded enough to recognize he had discovered something incredible in its author.
In a burst of excitement which comes when the proficient recognize virtuosity, he immediately set about attempting to bring Ramanujan to England to join him at the University of Cambridge. After some initial resistance, Ramanujan agreed and set out on the arduous journey through the Suez Canal, from the jewel of empire to its heart. Upon arrival in England, Ramanujan amazed Hardy with his natural ability. Here was an untrained mathematician with an eccentric style nobody had ever seen before and a talent which felt limitless. Through their collaboration, Hardy provided the training Ramanujan had previously lacked, metaphorically polishing the diamond as best he could. Soon, Ramanujan was astounding seasoned mathematicians with theorems that had gone unsolved for centuries, and ideas never before considered. In short order, he became an almost mythical figure in the math community, a sensation with seemingly impossible ability.
He was named one of the youngest ever Fellows of the Royal Society at 31, then became the first Indian ever elected a Fellow of Trinity College. The child prodigy had become a phenomenon as an adult. Then, as quickly as he came, he was gone. At the conclusion of World War 1, suffering from ill health brought about by wartime deprivation on his religious vegetarian diet, Ramanujan would return home to India. Shortly thereafter, he would die at the age of 32. Years after Ramanujans death, Hardy was asked to rate prominent mathematicians on the basis of pure talent using a scale of 1-100. He gave himself a 25, his colleague and friend Littlewoods, a 30; he gave legendary German mathematician David Hilbert one of the most influential minds of the 19th century an 80. To Ramanujan, he gave a score of 100. Having worked closer than anybody with Ramanujan, Hardy memorialized his unique ability in the following statement:
He combined a power of generalization, a feeling for form, and a capacity for rapid modification of his hypotheses, that were often really startling, and made him, in his own peculiar field, without a rival in his day. The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy’s theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was.
In short, Ramanujan was able to surpass even the greatest of mathematicians while lacking knowledge of the basic tools they employed. He did not build his work on the work of others, but rather seemed to just invent it for himself.
All told, Ramanujan compiled some 3900 mathematical results during his lifetime. Since his death, nearly all of his claims have been proved to be correct, opening up entirely new areas of study and inspiring much further research. In fact, his influence on the field was so prominent that The Ramanujan Journal was created as a scientific publication devoted solely to work in areas of math influenced by Ramanujan. But as decades have passed, something even more mind-blowing has emerged, another layer in the legend of Ramanujan.
As science and math have developed and evolved, Ramanujans work has become relevant to avenues of study which didn’t even exist when he was alive in areas like computer science, electrical engineering, and the study of black holes.
Consider, for example, that in his time, nobody knew black holes were something to study, yet Ramanujan had already developed a formula which would be used to describe their properties generations later. As mathematician Ken Ono of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia recently described: Ramanujans formulas have offered glimpses of theories that Ramanujan probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate himself, theories that nobody needed until they needed them.
How is this possible?
How could Ramanujan have known about things which did not exist?
so far beyond what was understood in his time?
Of this, Ono said, It is inconceivable he had this intuition, but he must have, while fellow mathematician Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, proclaimed Ramanujan had some sort of magic tricks that we don’t understand. Perhaps Dyson was onto something. Perhaps there was a factor we don’t understand at work; not magic, but something else. Ramanujan was known as a deeply religious Hindu. Many times, he credited his mathematical ability to his family goddess, Namagiri, asserting that an equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God. He described dreaming of blood drops, which symbolized this goddess, and how after these dreams, he would receive visions of complex mathematical formula on scrolls unfolding before his eyes.
It may sound hard to believe, or perhaps like Ramanujan had given in to his eccentricity, but curiously, it is not a unique story among high-level thinkers. The creator of the periodic table, Russian chemist Dmitri Medvedev, said that it came to him in a dream, that all of the elements, including some that were not even discovered yet, simply fell into place before him. Albert Einstein was famous for his thought experiments, in which he would sit in quiet solitude and imagine the results of theoretical concepts. It was during one of these thought experiments that he came up with the famous equation E = mc². Even Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was said to have received the inspiration for the iPhone in a daydream. There are many stories like this among humanity’s most legendary thinkers, tales of random inspiration pulled seemingly out of thin air. But there is an explanation, one which goes beyond magic or serendipity. The explanation is something called the Akashic Records.
From the Sanskrit word Akash, which refers to the essence of all things in the material world, what Plato and Aristotle called the quint-essence, the Akashic Records are a universal database of all human knowledge and experience. This database is said to be located on a higher plane of existence and available to be accessed by anyone at any time. Proponents of the concept point out that even Christian tradition seems to hint at the existence of this database. In Revelation 20:12, the Apostle John writes:
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. Is this book of life just another name for the Akashic Records?
Perhaps when Ramanujan received visions of complex math formulas, or when Medvedev dreamed the periodic table, or Einstein conducted thought experiments, or Steve Jobs saw the iPhone in a daydream, what they were really doing was accessing the Akashic Records. Perhaps the most fervent supporter of the existence of the Akashic Records is none other than Nikola Tesla. In his book, Mans Greatest Achievement published in 1907, Tesla said that: All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or equity beyond conception, filling all space, the a kasha or aluminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never-ending cycles all things and phenomena. Another well-known quote from Nikola Tesla, is this:
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists. Could this explain how these individuals were so far ahead of their contemporaries?
Could they have accessed the Akashic Records, where all human knowledge and experience is stored?
It may also explain child prodigies like Mozart, who should not have been able to obtain their achieved level of proficiency at such a young age, or why historic inventions like the telephone, airplane, and theory of evolution were developed not just by Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and Charles Darwin, but independently by others at near exactly the same time. Perhaps these were individuals who had independently accessed the knowledge contained within the Akashic Records. For Ramanujan, this begs an important question. Seemingly every year, his work provides new revelations, new relevant applications, whether on black holes or otherwise.
Already it has been speculated that in the future, Ramanujans work may have crucial relevance to next-level concepts like time travel, antigravity, and limitless energy. The question is, if Ramanujan did indeed access the Akashic records, this universal database of all human knowledge, how much did he learn?
What insights might he have left for us, which we have not yet discovered?
