The Indian Clerk Read Free

Corpus Christi. The summer before, Hardy watched him play in the freshman's match
     and thought him very good. (Also very handsome—though he does not say this.) Russell eats his gateau avec creme anglaise. It is a considerable relief when at long last the proctor utters the final grace, freeing Hardy to escape logical symbolism
     and walk over to Grange Road for his daily game of indoor tennis. As it happens, his partner this afternoon is a geneticist
     called Punnett, with whom he also sometimes plays cricket. And what does Punnett think of Chatterjee? he asks. "Perfectly
     fine," Punnett says. "They take their cricket seriously over there, you know. When I was in Calcutta, I spent hours on the
     maidan. We'd watch the young men play and eat the strangest stuff—a sort of puffed rice with a sticky sauce poured over it."
    Recollections of Calcutta distract Punnett, and Hardy beats him easily. They shake hands, and he returns to his rooms, wondering
     whether it's Chatterjee's playing or his handsomeness—a very European handsomeness that the contrasting dark skin only renders
     all the more unexpected—that has really drawn his attention. Meanwhile Hermione is yowling. The bedder has forgotten to feed
     her. He mixes tinned sardines, cold boiled rice, and milk in her dish, while she rubs her cheek against his leg. Glancing
     at the little rosewood table, he sees that the gyp has delivered another postcard from Littlewood, which he ignores as he
     did the last, not because he doesn't care to read it, but because one of the tenets that governs their partnership is that
     neither should ever feel obliged to postpone more pressing matters in order to answer the other's correspondence. By adhering
     to this rule, and others like it, they have established one of the only successful collaborations in the history of their
     solitary discipline, leading Bohr to quip, "Today, England can boast three great mathematicians: Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy-Littlewood."
    As for the letter, it sits where he had left it, on the table next to his battered rattan reading chair. Hardy picks it up.
     Is he wasting his time? Better, perhaps, just to toss it in the fire. No doubt others have done so. His is probably just one
     name on a list, possibly alphabetical, of famous British mathematicians to whom the Indian has sent the letter, one after
     the other. And if the others tossed the letter in the fire, why shouldn't he? He's a busy man. G. H. Hardy hardly (Hardy hardly) has time to examine the jottings of an obscure Indian clerk . . . as he finds himself doing now, rather against his will.
     Or so it feels.
    No details. No proofs. Just formulae and sketches. Most of it loses him completely—that is to say, if it's wrong, he has no
     idea how to determine that it's wrong. It resembles no mathematics he'd ever seen. There are assertions that baffle him completely.
     What, for instance, is one to make of this?

    Such a statement is pure lunacy. And yet, here and there amid the incomprehensible equations, the wild theorems unsupported
     by proof, there are also these bits that made sense—enough of them to keep him going. Some of the infinite series, for instance,
     he recognizes. Bauer published the first one, famous for its simplicity and beauty, in 1859.

    But how likely is it that the uneducated clerk Ramanujan claims to be would ever have come across this series? Is it possible
     that he discovered it on his own? And then there is one series that Hardy has never seen before in his life. It reads to him
     like a kind of poetry:

    What sort of imagination could come up with that? And the most miraculous thing—on his blackboard Hardy tests it, to the degree that he can test it—it appears to be correct.
    Hardy lights his pipe and begins pacing. In a matter of moments his exasperation has given way to amazement, his amazement
     to enthusiasm. What miracle has the post brought to him today? Something he's never dreamed of seeing. Genius in