Add Srinivasa Ramanujan and Carl Gauss

The then six-year-old Sharada, who used to quiz me with questions in Science and then adore me for the explanations, however undeserved, is quite a teenager now studying Bio-Technology. She spends time with cows! I need to pick a lesson or two from her on these emerging fields. But then, I should confront my ego first.

While I was battling with myself, it was a relief to hear the booming voice of my eight-year-old grandson Ganesh who asked, "Thatha have you heard of Ramanuja?” What an insult, I thought since maths is my weakness if not strength. But then I had a little doubt and asked him, “Which one, Ramanujan or Ramanujar?” "Oh, there are two of them, is it? I mean the maths guy”. My first feeling was stunned disbelief that someone even from the US called the great Sininivasa Ramanujan, a guy, but got relieved he was not asking about Saint Ramanujar, where I stand even more inadequately.

Ramanujan was a man with an extraordinary gift in maths, and several of his conjectures like continued fractions and partition theory developed while in Cambridge under Hardy are yet to be proved wrong as on date. And eager not to lose his attention on maths, I said, “There is an anecdote which is attributed to Carl Gauss the Prince of Maths, but some say it was Ramanujan. When he was of your age, the teacher, to engage the children, asked them to add from 1 to 10. The little ones took their slate and pencil and started laboriously. 1 plus 2 is 3, plus 3 is 6 and so on. But almost immediately, Ramanujan said the answer is 55. To the utter astonishment of the teacher, he explained, write 1,2,3 up to 10 in a line, and below that write 10 below 1, 9 below 2, 8 below 3 etc. If you add, you get 11 every time for all the 10 additions, and 10 times 11 is 110. The answer is half that, 55.”

Unlike Sharada, he didn’t put his hands around my neck to say “You are great, Thatha”, as we were on Skype, but more importantly, he didn’t think much of my anecdote.

He called me again after a while and said he had found a simpler method to get the solution. "Halfway from 1 to 10 is not 5 nor 6, but five and a half, and 10 times that is 55, cool, is it not Thatha, I can do it for 1 to 100 also”.

I was dumbfounded. My wife said I found a match in an eight-year-old at last. The line went dead before I wanted to show my superiority by introducing other works of Ramanujan like continued fractions. But, first I should study more myself, right?