Ken Ono Ramanujan

Ken Ono
Amir D. Aczel
My Search
for Ramanujan
How I learned to count
My Search for Ramanujan
How I Learned to Count
KenOno AmirD.Aczel
My Search for Ramanujan

How I Learned to Count
KenOno AmirD.Aczel
Department of Mathematics Center for Philosophy & History of Science
and Computer Science Boston University
Emory University Boston, MA, USA
Atlanta, GA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-25566-8 ISBN 978-3-319-25568-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959483
Springer Cham Heidelberg NewYork Dordrecht London

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To the memory of Basil Gordon and Paul Sally and to Andrew Granville
PREFACE
Although this book is a first-person narrative in my voice, it represents

collaborative work between me and my friend and coauthor, Amir D.Aczel. This
book was his idea, and without him it would never have been written. I am
deeply saddened by the fact that Amir passed away unexpectedly before work on
the book was complete. Amir was a passionate man who took great pride in
spreading scientific ideas through his writing. I will miss him. He still had so
much to give to the world.
Ever since I was a teenager growing up in a suburb of Baltimore, I have been
enchanted by the story of Ramanujan. I first learned about him when my father,
a prominent mathematician, received a letter from Ramanujans widow, sixty
years after her husbands death. Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was an enigmatic
Indian mathematician who, without formal education in advanced mathemat-
ics, was able to derive thousands of unproved, yet valid, mathematical formulas
and identities. As a mathematician, I have spent my career extending and prov-
ing some of Ramanujans results, largely in an attempt to understand the soul
and spirit of this genius who died at the young age of thirty-two. Along the way,
I found myself and came to terms with my past.
This book is the result of my strong need to tell the world about how the story
of this man and his mathematics helped transform me. I was once an emotion-
ally frail, dispirited sixteen-year-old high-school dropout on the run from
myself. Today, I am content. I have a loving family, I am a successful mathemati-
cian, and I have a rich spiritual life. As the character Jerry puts it in Edward
Albees play The Zoo Story, Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance
out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
Acknowledgments
Amir and I could not have written this book without the help and support of
many people. First of all, we thank our families: our wives, Debra Aczel and
Erika Ono, and my parents, Sachiko and Takashi Ono, for their tough love and
unwavering support. I thank my colleagues Krishnaswami Alladi, George
vii
PR E FAC E
Andrews, Dick Askey, and Bruce Berndt for their shared enthusiasm for this
story. We express our deepest gratitude to SASTRA University, in India, for con-
verting Ramanujans childhood home in Kumbakonam into a museum and for
establishing the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. I am indebted to Krishnaswami
Alladi for playing a central role in honoring the memory of Ramanujan and for
hosting me on my many trips to India. I thank Emory University and the Asa
Griggs Candler Fund for their financial support, and we thank Matthew Brown,
director of the film The Man Who Knew Infinity, and Pressman Films for their
cooperation. The film is based on the superb book The Man Who Knew Infinity:
A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, by Robert Kanigel. We are grateful to Robert for
writing this exceptional biography twenty-five years ago.
We are indebted to Henna Cho, Carol Clark, Melissa Mouly Di Teresa, Danny
Gulden, Robert Schneider, Marc Strauss, and Sarah Trebat-Leder, who provided
many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this book. Without their help, the
book would have fallen far short of its intended goals. We thank our editor, Marc
Strauss, for encouraging us to tell this story. And we thank our copyeditor, David
Kramer, for beautifying and polishing our manuscript. He improved our book in
uncountably many ways. Finally, we thank our literary agent, Albert Zuckerman,
for helping us make this book a reality.
I am one of the luckiest mathematicians in the world. I have been guided by
three amazing men, without whose friendship and guidance I would certainly
have had nothing to write about. We dedicate this book to them, my mentors:
Paul Sally, Basil Gordon, and Andrew Granville. Sally rescued me when I was an
unmotivated undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Gordon taught me
how to do mathematics for its own sake. Granville taught me how to become a
professional mathematician. These men reformed, transformed, inspired, and
coached me, and they made me what I am today, an active, spiritually aware
mathematician with a story to tell.
Atlanta, GA KenOno
Boston, MA AmirD.Aczel
December 2015
viii
PROLOGUE: MY HAPPY PLACE
I cannot sleep. I have a lot on my mind. It is 5:30a.m. on May 28, 2015, and I am
sitting on the lanai of an oceanview room at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort
on the island of Maui. The doves are cooing. The gentle ocean breeze and the
soothing sounds of waves crashing on the white sandy beach below define this
heavenly moment. I am waiting for the first hint of the suns rays in what I expect
will be an absolutely glorious sunrise, with the Haleakala volcano as a
backdrop.
I have never been happier.
Last night, I enjoyed a lovely evening with my wife, Erika, complete with a
delicious sunset dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant on the beach in Kihei. This
week we are celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, doing many of
the things we love most: mountain biking in the Makawao Forest Preserve,
scuba diving in search of manta rays and green sea turtles, hiking the lava fields
that formed this gorgeous island, surfing the waves at Kalama Beach, among
other activities that define our active lives. Our teenage children, Aspen, who is
an undergraduate at Emory University, and Sage, a rising junior at Centennial
High School, in Roswell, Georgia, are home alone, enjoying ten days of freedom
from their parents. They are great kids; we couldnt be more proud of the young
adults that they have become.
Although the last twenty-five years seem to have passed by in a blur, Erika and
I are blessed in that life has not passed us by. We have spent much of this week
reminiscing about the path we have takenour college years in Chicago, our
years in Los Angeles, where I earned my doctorate, my postdoctoral tour of
America, the birth of our kids, and so on. We have been leading rich lives. We
have traveled the world, and we have many good friends. We are at peace with
who we are as a couple, as parents, and as individuals. I am a successful mathe-
matician, a professor at Emory University, and I am considered a leader in my
field. I am a well-known mentor of young mathematicians. To borrow an over-
used phrase, Im living the dream.
How have I been lucky enough to get to where I am today?
ix
PROL O GU E : M Y H A PPY PL AC E
With Erika on Maui (May 27, 2015)
That is the question that keeps me awake. It is a question of grace and gratitude,
a question that I ask every day in wonder, almost out of fear that I will be awak-
ened from this lovely dream to discover that none of my life has actually hap-
pened. It is a question that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Erika knows this
about me. But even she will be surprised when she reads some of the details of
the story I am about to tell, events that I havent shared with anyone before.
It wasnt that long ago that my waking thoughts, the parental voices in my
head, were about inadequacy and fear of failure. There was a time when I couldnt
even imagine wanting to live long enough to witness my thirty-second birthday.
In a moment of weakness and despair twenty-three years ago, when I was
twenty-four, I came within seconds of taking my own life. In a torrential rain-
storm, I veered over the double yellow line of a Montana highway, near a place
called Ronan, with the intention of driving headlong into an oncoming logging
truck. I swerved back into my lane at the sound of the truckers frantic horn, and
I pulled over and came to a stop on that lonely strip of asphalt in the middle of a
vast wilderness. I sat there alone, with the engine running, protected from the
driving rain, for an eternity, trying to figure out what I was going to do with the
life I had just failed to destroy. The harrowing voices, the product of my confus-
ing and frustrating childhood as one of three sons of tough-loving, hard-driving
Japanese-American parents, had nearly dragged me to my death.
x
PROL O GU E : M Y H A PPY PL AC E
Most of my current acquaintances know nothing of my past. I have done my

best to erase my childhood by pretending to myself that my life began when I
was sixteen years old. I ran away from my former life, and I have successfully
managed to live my adult life in self-imposed amnesia. I almost never talk about
my life before college; the memories are too painful. Instead of coming to terms
with the past, I dumped it into a black hole, a massive part of my history from
which memories could not escape.
I was so tortured by those voices that I dropped out of high school in the naive
hope that I could escape my feelings of inadequacy. I have spoken to not more
than one or two of my former classmates and friends since that day over thirty
years ago. I didnt return phone calls from former friends who were wondering
what had become of me. I made a clean break. I simply abandoned my former
self. Although I didnt understand it at the time, I now feel that I was committing
a metaphorical ritual suicide, what the Japanese call seppuku.
I was raised by tiger parents, a term applied to Asian-American parents who
raise their children in an overly strict way (by Western standards) with the goal of
fostering an academically competitive spirit. This form of upbringing is intended
to direct a child toward success, and it has one goalto raise extraordinarily suc-
cessful children, conquerors of their fields. Tiger parents set high academic stan-
dards, and they severely restrict nonacademic activities with this long-term goal
in mind. That is how my parents showed their love for me, by demanding nothing
less than the best. But the cost was enormous. It almost killed me.
My professional success confirms, and perhaps even justifies, the merits of
this philosophy. There is certainly much truth to the undeniable fact that my
parents fostered qualities in me that have been essential for my success. I am
ambitious and competitive. I am restless, anxious to take on the next challenge.
I thank my parents, whom I love deeply, for instilling these qualities in me.
This style of parenting, however, especially when carried to the degree that I
experienced, has the potential of crushing a childs spirit. Children can grow up
emotionally unfulfilled and starving for recognition. Those voices in my head
that nearly drove me mad, my despair and feelings of worthlessness, all attest to
that fact.
What vanquished those voices and gave me back my soul? The answer involves
a mysterious genius from India, a man whose story inspired me at my lowest
points, and whose ideas have powered my career.
Let me tell it to you as I remember it.
Makena Beach, Maui, HI

May 2015
xi
CONTENTS
Part I

MY LIFE BEFORE RAMANUJAN
Chapter 1

TIGER BOY 3
Chapter 2

MY PARENTS GENERATION 13
Chapter 3

MY CHILDHOOD (19701984) 27
Chapter 4

AN UNEXPECTED LETTER 43
Chapter 5

MY ESCAPE 49
Part II

THE LEGEND OF RAMANUJAN
Chapter 6

LITTLE LORD 53
Chapter 7

A CREATIVE GENIUS 59
xiii
C ON T E N T S
Chapter 8

AN ADDICTION 63
Chapter 9

THE GODDESS 67
Chapter 10

PURGATORY 69
Chapter 11

JANAKI 73
Chapter 12

I BEG TOINTRODUCE MYSELF 75
Chapter 13

THESE FORMULAS DEFEATED ME COMPLETELY 79
Chapter 14

PERMISSION FROMTHEGODDESS 85
Chapter 15

TOGETHER AT LAST 89
Chapter 16

CULTURE SHOCK 91
Chapter 17

TRIUMPH OVER RACISM 93
Chapter 18

ENGLISH MALAISE 97
xiv
C ON T E N T S
Chapter 19

HOMECOMING 99
Chapter 20

THE TRAGIC END 103
Part III

MY LIFE ADRIFT
Chapter 21

I BELIEVE INSANTA 107
Chapter 22

COLLEGE BOY 111
Chapter 23

ERIKA 119
Chapter 24

THE PIRATE PROFESSOR 123
Chapter 25

GROWING PAINS 131
Part IV

FINDING MY WAY
Chapter 26

MY TEACHER 141
Chapter 27

HITTING BOTTOM 149
xv
C ON T E N T S
Chapter 28

A MIRACLE 157
Chapter 29

MY HARDY 167
Chapter 30

HITTING MY STRIDE 173
Chapter 31

BITTERSWEET REUNION 185
Chapter 32

I COUNT NOW 191
Chapter 33

THE IDEA OFRAMANUJAN 197
Chapter 34

MY SPIRITUALITY 201
EPILOGUE 205
AFTERWORD 223
xvi
Part I
My Life Before Ramanujan
Chapter 1

TIGER BOY
Lutherville, Maryland (19761984)
I
m sitting on the couch watching Gilligans Island, every second-graders
favorite sitcom. Its the episode where the headhunters from a neighboring
island attack the motley crew of castaways. As usual, the klutzy skinny first
mate Gilligan accidentally saves the day, in this episode by scaring off the
headhunters.
I really should be doing the geometry problems that my parents assigned me,
but they arent home, and I love Gilligans Island. If my parents find out, Ill be in
super big trouble. But Im prepared. I have a washcloth and a small pink plastic
basin filled with ice water. The TV is on low enough that I will be able to hear my
parents pull into the driveway, which will give me just enough time to turn off
the TV and cool the back of the set with the ice-cold washcloth.
My second-grade portrait

K. Ono, A.D. Aczel, My Search for Ramanujan, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_1
3
CHAPTER 1
Does this seem over the top?

In her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua, a Yale law professor,
writes about what she calls tiger parenting, a traditional strict form of child-
rearing popular in Asia and among Asian-American families. This tiger mom
ideology accurately describes the approach of my Japanese immigrant parents,
Sachiko and Takashi Ono. Like other tiger parents, they believed that their chil-
dren could be the best students and that academic achievement is a reflection
of successful parenting. Indeed, if their children are not at the top of their class,
then the parents arent doing their job. My parents went a step further. If I wasnt
the best student, then I would bring shame on my family. It was understood that
it was my duty to be the best.
My parents in 1999 (photo by

Olan Mills)
I emerged from my early childhood with the voices of my parents in my head

that continually rebuked me for my inadequacy and my inability to live up to
their unrealistic expectations:
Ken-chan, your parents are disappointed in you. You are embarrassment.

Look at that professors children. Unlike you, they study all of time, and they
what you should be. You sloppy. You spoiled. Your mother sacrificed her life
for you, so you do your part. What wrong with you? You want play all of time?
4
T IGE R BOY
Those voices told me that my parents would love me only if I was both a star
student and a brilliant musician. Those voices told me that it was wrong to relax
and have fun and hang out with friends. When I did those things, those voices
made certain that I suffered tremendous pangs of guilt.
I now understand that many children today hear similar voices. Tragically,
some of these children will succumb to those voices and take their own lives.
Moreover, those suicides often occur in clusters, a phenomenon that has recently
become a source of concern in communities like Palo Alto, where elevated aca-
demic expectations are rampant and such parenting is common.
Those voices are symptoms of an anxiety disorder that has been the focus of
considerable recent study by clinical psychologists. Their research suggests that
children of tiger parents are often burdened with anxieties that last a lifetime.
The research also offers a possible biological explanation for this phenomenon.
When we realize that we have made a mistake, a predictable electroneurological
process called error-related negativity (ERN) is triggered in the medial prefrontal
cortex of our brains. It acts as a reset button for the brain. It is now believed that the
strength of ERN is negatively impacted by prolonged exposure to harsh criticism.
I didnt need this research to understand the validity of its conclusions. I have
firsthand knowledge. I became desperate for the love and approval of my par-
ents, and when I failed and failed again to obtain it, my life began to unravel.
For you to understand how all this came to be, I will have to explain my fam-
ily. My parents raised my two brothers and me under the assumption that we
were somehow genetically predestined, with each son to follow a well-defined
path that my parents determined in response to the talents and strengths we
exhibited in our early years. Our job was simplestay on track and succeed in
the lives that our parents had prescribed for us. I felt that I never had a choice.
My oldest brother, Momoro, was gifted in music. He was a child prodigy. You
know the kindthe cute Asian-American third-grader with a bowl haircut,
dressed in a tuxedo, dazzling television audiences with a precocious rendition of
a Tchaikovsky piano concerto. He was going to be a concert pianist who per-
formed at Carnegie Hall.
Santa, the middle son, had a different path. He was often described as the black
sheep of the family, which is ironic, because he is the one who will go on to be the
most successful son. My parents felt that he was unlikely to amount to much of
anything, so he was expected to be an ordinary company man, whatever that
meant. As a second-grader, I understood only that it referred to something that my
parents viewed as significantly below concert pianist and university professor.
I was being groomed to be a mathematician in the image of my father. But I
was also expected to be an outstanding musician. I was only in second grade,
5
CHAPTER 1
but I already had the next twenty-five years mapped out for me. I was to attend
one of the best Ivy League universities, earn a PhD in mathematics, and then
secure a professorship at a top university.
My parents showed their love for us, which I didnt understand at the time, by
defining our long-term professional goals and offering opportunities that pow-
ered us toward them. Their entire focus was on those goals, in the belief that we
would reach our happy places by achieving them.
The rules that they made were simple to follow, reducing each of our lives to an
individual formula. To achieve the goals that our parents had set for us was going
to be easyas easy as basic algebra: just as plugging x = 2 into the formula y
= 3x + 1 gives the value y = 7, I was given a simple formula for becoming a math-
ematicianI had to be a straight-A student who earned top scores on all my tests.
And for good measure, I was expected to become an accomplished violinist.
Everything outside of the formula was considered extraneous, and if we ever
strayed in the slightest from our formulas, we were subjected to a litany of
rebukes and threats that discouraged and humiliated us.
Here is a vivid example of what I am talking about. I was in third grade. Each
year in elementary school, we took the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, standardized
tests that were administered as a tool for improving instruction. These tests eval-
uated our skills in grammar, reading comprehension, and mathematics. When
my parents received my scores, they were shocked at my poor performance:
ninety-eighth percentile in math and ninety-seventh percentile in reading com-
prehension. They summoned me to the kitchen and sat me down at the head of
the table. Pacing behind me, they rebuked me for my embarrassingly inadequate
performance:
Ken-chan, onein fifty people did better in math. Even more better in English.
Thats fifty thousand kids in country. You arent even among best fifty
thousand. Harvard only accepts few thousand. If you dont fix, you might
end up at University of Maryland, or, God forbid, Towson State. You must
get ninety-ninth percentiles. That professors children all got these scores, and
look how successful they are. We sacrificing everything for you three boys,
and this how you thank us? If you wont do better, then get out of house!
Then they left the room, while I sat alone at the table crying, with only the
ticking of the clock and the rumble of the fridge to keep me company. Half an
hour later Id hear the shuffling of slippers, which signaled their return, and they
6
T IGE R BOY
repeated the diatribe again. I wanted to sink through the floor, or at least to
escape to the privacy of my room.
Between me and my two brothers, incidents like this were common in my
early childhood. One of us would be scolded while the other two would cower in
their bedrooms, thankful that it wasnt their turn. Truth be told, I was on the
receiving end of these rants much less often than my two older brothers.
My parents forbade just about everything that was not directly tied to our
formulaic lives. There was no room for Gilligans Island. Santa was forbidden
from attending his high-school prom. When he sneaked out to attend despite
their prohibition, my parents tracked him down and brought him home. Imagine
the humiliation of being pulled from the prom in front of your classmates. My
parents view was that this time-honored rite of passage was not for serious stu-
dents, not part of the formula. Perhaps they also wanted to protect him from the
bad influences they imagined he would be exposed to.
Here is another example. Let me explain why I cant watch the Star Wars mov-
ies. When the first Star Wars film came out in 1977, I begged my parents to let
me go with my friends to the movie theater to see it. Many of my friends saw the
film several times, and so I had plenty of opportunities. After incessant pleading,
my parents finally relented, but under one conditionthat I write a three-page
essay explaining the importance of the film and the deeper meaning of the story.
I was a nine-year-old who simply wanted to delight in the droids and bizarre
space creatures that everyone was talking about. Instead, the film became an
academic exercise complete with edits and revisions. To this day, I cant watch
any of the sequels. The mere thought of Star Wars stirs up painful memories.
But when it came to academics and music, my parents offered me the best.
They bought me computers: I was one of the first kids at school to get an Apple
II.They enrolled me for violin lessons at the Peabody Institute. Peabody is an
internationally renowned conservatory that has trained famous musicians like
singer Tori Amos and pianist Andr Watts. My parents engaged Yong Ku Ahn, a
distinguished Peabody Institute professor, to teach me to play the violin. And the
violin they bought for me was the product of a nineteenth-century Italian crafts-
man. I didnt understand until much later that beginning violinists dont usually
take their first lessons from a well-known virtuoso, and they dont typically play
an instrument whose value is roughly that of a brand-new car.
As part of my mathematical training, my father had me write computer pro-
grams to collect data for his mathematics graduate students. I actually enjoyed
doing this, and it was the source of some of the very few memories I have of the
parental attention and approval that I so badly craved. Even though I didnt know
7
CHAPTER 1
anything about class numbers of quadratic forms, I was able to write computer
programs that computed tables of them. I was delighted that I, a kid in elemen-
tary school, could help produce results that were published in a PhD thesis.
But these opportunities always came with a price, and when it came to music,
the price was more than I was able or willing to pay. I took lessons from Professor
Ahn for almost ten years. Each week, both my parents drove me to his home,
and then they sat in on my lesson, taking note of my progress. The pressure was
unendurable. Instead of concentrating on my playing, I constantly had my eyes
on my parents, looking for evidence of their approval or chagrin. They never told
me that I had done well; I believe that the thought of giving praise never crossed
their minds. And on the long drive home, they would rehash the lesson, remind-
ing me of the mistakes I had made and emphasizing the improvements that were
expected of me for the next lesson.
Despite the fact that I became an accomplished violinist, making second chair
in the first violin section of the Peabody Preparatory Orchestra, there is very
little that I can say that might put a positive spin on my musical career. I hated
the violin.
One day, when I was in tenth grade, I simply quit. I have picked up a violin
only once since then, and that was five years later, when Erika, who would later
become my wife, brought me to her home for the first time to meet her parents.
In my desire to impress them, I unthinkingly broke my black-hole rule: I men-
tioned that I had been an accomplished violinist. To my surprise, they actually
wanted to hear me play. And to my chagrin, there was a violinErikas sisters
in the house. They no doubt thought that I would be delighted to play for them,
and they had every reason to expect to hear an accomplished violinist produce
lovely music. I tried to play, but I couldnt. Instead, I sat alone in Erikas sisters
bedroom, holding her violin while I tore myself apart inside. How could I pos-
sibly explain? How could I make them understand? They had no idea of what
they were asking me to do.
Still in the bedroom, I finally worked up a bit of courage and began softly
playing Bachs Partita Number 3 from memory. The sight of my reflection in the
mirrored closet doors aroused painful long-dormant memories, and it was more
than I could bear. After a few minutes, I stopped playing, and I told Erika and
her parents that I just couldnt perform for them. At least, I thought, they had
overheard enough to know that I had indeed been a competent violinist. And I
was grateful that they had apparently recognized that I was in the grip of an
inner struggle, and I was relieved when they let the incident pass without press-
ing me for details. When this book is published and Erikas parents read this
8
T IGE R BOY
paragraph, they will finally understand something of the inner torment that I
was suffering on that day almost thirty years ago.
Quitting the violin was my first successful act of rebellion against my parents.
They berated me for the decision, and it took several weeks before they retreated
in the face of my implacable conviction. We had heated arguments, and I heard
many reasons why I had to resume my lessons:
If you quit, then what will everyone think? You disappointment for family.
You let Professor Ahn down. He will never forgive you. He believe that you
talented enough for Juilliard School. How can you quit after all that he
done? He spent hundreds of hours when he could have taught someone else
who grateful. If you quit he will cry. You understand how lucky you are?
How can you quit something you good at? If I had your talent I would
practice ten times as much as you. How could you be so thankless? We
struggled to pay for expensive violin and lessons. Your mother took part-
time job as seamstress doing alterations for local dry cleaner so that you can
have violin and lessons. She could have go to beauty salon, but more
important to make you something good for your life.
Although I had hell to pay for quitting the violin, I had stood up for myself,
and I was proud for having had the courage and strength to do so. I had no idea
that I would soon draw on that strength to rebel again by running away from
my life.
I know now that my parents loved me. What I didnt understand at the time is
that they showed their love in ways that I didnt, couldnt, recognize or appreci-
ate. It was love, but it wasnt enough. I was completely unaware of their personal
history as immigrants to America who had come of age in Japan during World
War II and the postwar reconstruction. My parents rarely spoke of their
childhood, and we had almost no contact with our relatives in Japan. I had no
way of comprehending the demons and challenges that they faced as they did
their best to raise three boys, isolated in a culture that they knew nothing about.
I understood only that lifewith my parents at the centerwas not treating me
fairly, and for that my heart was full of bitterness.
In my memory I was never hugged by my parents, and they never told me that
they loved me during my formative years. I understand now my parents ratio-
nale for how they raised me and my brothers. Their parenting focused exclusively
on long-term professional goals, and they believed that offering praise and love
9
CHAPTER 1
for smaller accomplishments would diminish our chances of achieving the more
worthy ones. They wanted their boys to be hungry for success, and so they
starved us of praise. They aimed to foster our competitive spirit in this way, a
common practice among tiger parents.
Of course, I didnt understand this as a teenager. I couldnt get beyond my
pressure cooker of a life, and as one of the few Asian-American kids at school, I
felt alone, without anyone to identify with. I was being tossed around between
two divergent cultures. At school, I was a star student, while at home, I was a
disappointment to my parents and a failure for falling short of their impossible
expectations. And like any child, I wished to please my parents, but nothing I
did was good enough for them. No matter how hard I tried, my accomplish-
ments were ignored or belittled. They saw no point in acknowledging such
insignificant achievements as straight As on a report card or a medal from the
local science fair.
My parents did not approve of my friends. Without a cohort of Japanese-
American classmates at school who also happened to be the offspring of univer-
sity professors, there was no way that I could have more than one or two friends
that they were willing to embrace. In their view, it wasnt even important to have
friends. It was enough that we had a dog, a dachshund, named Igor Stravinsky in
honor of my fathers favorite Russian composer.
My parents never said so, but I think that through the end of elementary
school, I did my job well. I was one of the best students. But it wasnt easy; plug-
ging into my formula was an emotionally exhausting occupation.
Beginning in seventh grade, my life became more of a struggle. My math
teacher, Mrs. Sprankle, a wonderful woman in her fifties, encouraged her
pupils parents to be involved with her class. To promote this, she required us
to show our parents our graded tests and return them to her with a parental
signature. Although I was the top student in class, I couldnt bear to show my
parents any test that had less than a perfect score. I knew what they would say.
After all, my job was not to be the best student in class, it was to be a perfect
student, and for the son of a famous mathematician, nothing less than perfec-
tion would do. We are not talking about higher mathematics here. This was
first-year algebra, a subject that my parents didnt even view as mathematics. It
was barely a step above glorified counting. As I write this, I hear echoes of their
voices from the past. In a slow drawl with a Japanese accent they are saying,
Ken-chan, you got ninety-five percent. Not good. Why you get easy problem
wrong? You must do better.
Despite the fact that I earned an A on every algebra test that year, I never
showed a single one of them to my parents. Test after test, I locked myself in the
10
T IGE R BOY
bathroom and stared at the test paper trying to summon the courage to ask my
mother for her signature. I was good at doing what I was told, but I could not do
what Mrs. Sprankle had asked of me. Yet the test had to be signed, and so I
deceived Mrs. Sprankle by forging my mothers signature again and again. The
voices in my head began around that time.
Mrs. Sprankle was very fond of me. I was her best student. I spent hours
visiting with her after school. I cleaned her chalkboard. I tutored other kids in
class. She offered me encouragement and love. I didnt understand it at the time,
but I realize now that she was nurturing me in ways that she must have seen I
desperately needed.
I was so ashamed to have to deceive her, for she was one of the few adults in
my life at the time who offered me encouragement and recognition. I couldnt
understand how I could be the best math student at school, earning the praise
and attention of my teachers, but then be not quite good enough at home. Not
quite good enough? At home, I was an abject failure!
By the end of tenth grade, I couldnt take it anymore.
I awoke each day with very painful thoughts: I will never be good enough. Im
an impostor. My parents will never love me because I will never live up to their
expectations. No matter how well I do, I ought to have done better. It seems that
there is nothing I can do to earn their approval.
And so I dropped out.
11
Chapter 2

MY PARENTS GENERATION
I
f you are to have a sympathetic understanding of my history, you will have
to understand my roots, the story of how my parents left their families and
everything they knew behind when they came to America for what was
supposed to be a short visit. That short visit became a lifetime, and my parents
became issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants to the United States of
America. And as the American-born sons of my parents, my brothers and I are
nisei, children of the second generation.
Takasan, Tokyo (1943)
The slight fourteen-year-old-boy with angular facial features is riding his forty-
pound one-speed Japanese bicycle, fenders creaking, through the crowded narrow
streets of his Tokyo neighborhood. Dressed in his military-style uniform, he is rid-
ing to school on his daily route, passing bustling markets selling rice, tea, vinegar,
and other goods at the start of what had begun as an ordinary school day. The streets
are teeming with bicycles and pedestrians, all traveling in a frenetic but somehow
orderly fashion. Many of the men are dressed in bland western business attire as
they head for work, but the women are radiant in their colorful flowery kimonos.
The two-wheeler gives the boy a sense of freedom. He rides his bike ten miles
every school day, safely weaving through the commotion that is Tokyo. Those
miles of solitary travel in Tokyos tumult offer him a private world, an island of
solitude where he can escape boredom as the time flies beneath his wheels.
But this morning turns out to be no ordinary day. Suddenly, his rear wheel
kicks up a large stone and flings the projectile in a fateful arc straight through the
large plate glass window of a small tailor shop, smashing it to bits. He halts his bike.

13
CHAPTER 2
The thunderous sound of crashing shards and the crowd of onlookers that gath-
ers frighten him. In a panic, and afraid of facing the shopkeepers wrath, the boy
mounts his bicycle and disappears down the crowded street.
After school, he chooses a different route home; he is afraid to face the conse-
quences. Later that night, overwhelmed with shame and guilt, he vows to visit
the shop the next day to pay for the repairs. The next morning, after some fur-
ther soul-searching, he musters his courage and makes his way to the shop.
To his horror, he arrives to find a giant crater where the shop had been. The
previous night, as was common at that time, a fleet of American bombers had
conducted a long-range firebombing raid. The shop has disappeared, as has
almost the entire block. There is no shop-owner to repay; he is one of many
innocent casualties of war whose lives have been extinguished for reasons the
boy doesnt understand.
That boy is Takashi Ono, and he will become my father, whom we call Takasan
in reverence.
This story is one of the few that my father tells about his childhood. My par-
ents were born and raised in Japan. My father was born in 1928, and my mother
in 1936. They came of age during World War II and the subsequent difficult
postwar reconstruction.
Takasan, ca. 1935
14
M Y PA R E N T S GE N E R AT ION
My father has a small number of stories about his childhood that he likes
to tell and retell. Some involve his athletic prowess; it seems that he was a fast
runner in high school. However, the crucial ones, the stories that must be
understood to penetrate our family, all involve war. They are stories about
fire and smoke, weeks of hunger, and the stench of death. They are the stuff
of nightmares, but for my parents, they are more than bad dreams. Those
nightmares are their history, their daily reality when they were growing up
in Yokohama and Tokyo at a time when surviving to the next day was the
only goal.
It was difficult for the Japanese to grasp what was happening. Their country
was supposed to be everywhere triumphant. In the eighty years preceding the
war, Japan had transformed itself from a feudal state to a world power thanks to
a major investment in industrialization and modernization.
That development was accompanied by a rise in militarism, which led to
Japans quest to conquer Asia, beginning with victorious wars against China and
Russia. During those conflicts, the Japanese military committed unspeakable
atrocities against the civilian populations. The Nanjing Massacre, also known as
the Rape of Nanjing, is perhaps the most infamous war crime committed by the
Japanese military in the years immediately preceding World War II.Nanjing, the
capital of the Republic of China, fell to the Japanese army in December 1937. For
six weeks, Japanese soldiers raped, looted, and murdered Chinese citizens with
impunity. The murders were justified by the pretext that large numbers of
Chinese soldiers were disguised as civilians. It is estimated that 200,000 civilians
and prisoners of war perished.
Such atrocities contributed to the worldwide opinion, which persists in the
minds of some today, that the Japanese are a barbaric race. But the Japanese were
taught otherwise, that they were superior to all other races.
In the nineteenth century, Japan had a spiritual government, the State
Shinto, which promoted the unity of government with certain aspects of
Shintoism. The Japanese emperor was considered divine, and government lead-
ers often performed religious ceremonies in which they communicated with the
Sun Goddess. Japanese citizens were taught that self-sacrifice was the greatest
virtue, and sacrificing oneself in service to the nation was regarded as the great-
est expression of patriotism.
In the early twentieth century, as an extension of some of the principles
underlying its isolationist policies of the mid-seventeenth through mid-
nineteenth centuries, the imperial government reinforced the notion that the
Japanese were an exceptional race. Government scientists even offered proof of
this superiority by noting that the Japanese had a higher forehead-to-nose ratio,
15
CHAPTER 2
less body odor, and less body hair than other peoples. In contrast, the Americans
were little more than yaju, wild beasts.
The Japanese government maintained this propaganda throughout World
War II, even as firebombs devastated the neighborhoods of Tokyo. That was the
Japan of my parents youth, a tumultuous time when everything they had been
taught about their country crumbled before their eyes.
For a people that had been taught that their emperor was a god and that their
race was superior to all others, this change in fortune was unfathomable. Finally,
they were confronted with the undeniable reality and humiliation of resounding
defeat and unconditional surrender. What happens to a nations psyche when its
divine leader and superior race of warriors are defeated by a nation of wild
beasts? How does a nation recover?
A nation recovers ultimately from the recovery of each individual, and for my
father, the path to wholeness was through mathematics. Perhaps mathematics
was his escape from a brutal and inhuman existence. He had always been good
at math, and as a young man, he joined with other young Japanese men to create
a community of self-taught mathematicians. Their goal was to escape their
dreary lives by making a mark in the world of mathematics. They had to learn
from one another: their universities had been decimated by war, and the few
professors remaining were unaware of the current research that was being pro-
duced in Europe and the United States.
My father got his big break thanks to the generosity of Andr Weil, who had
emigrated from France to the United States in 1941 and was now a member of
the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey.
Weil was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century.
He was a founding member and the self-styled leader of the Bourbaki group, a
collective of mostly French mathematicians who aimed to reformulate mathe-
matics based on extremely abstract but self-contained formal foundations. They
wrote a series of books, published under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, that
codified several branches of modern mathematics.
Weil met my father in 1955 during a trip to Japan to attend the TokyoNikko
conference on algebraic number theory, at which time my father was a graduate
student at Nagoya University. The conference was an important opportunity for
Japan to reengage with the world in the name of science. In his opening address,
Zyoiti Suetuna, the chairman of the symposium, proclaimed,
We can say that this kind of an international meeting, which aims

at the cultural development of mankind regardless of all the political, social,
16
and racial differences, will exert not a small influence on advancement of

international cooperation and peace in the world.
The conference was a tremendous success in this regard. In addition, the confer-
ence was the unexpected site of one of the most famous events in twentieth-century
mathematics, though it would be recognized as such only many years later.
At the time of the symposium, Weil was a professor at the University of
Chicago. Weil and Jean-Pierre Serre, a fellow Bourbaki member and future pro-
fessional acquaintance of mine who had been awarded the Fields Medal the pre-
vious year, were two of the distinguished speakers at the conference. The Fields
Medal, which is awarded at the quadrennial International Congress of
Mathematicians, is regarded as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The self-
taught young Japanese mathematicians were thrilled to have the opportunity to
mingle and chat with some of the worlds best mathematicians.
For many of those young Japanese mathematicians, including my father, that
meeting changed the course of their lives. These men had been toiling away for
years on their research in solitude and isolation, first during World War II and
then during the postwar reconstruction. They were poor, and they were hungry,
and not only for knowledge, for they had little to eat, often getting by on nothing
more than an occasional bowl of rice. Despite their circumstances, they set their
sights high, and they aimed to make a mark in the world of mathematics. The
conference was their opportunity to share the fruits of their labor with impor-
tant mathematicians with access to the entire world of mathematics outside of
Japan. These young men hoped finally to be rewarded with international
recognition.
That dream became a reality for a surprisingly large number of them.
Impressed by their work ethic and their accomplishments, Weil used his influ-
ence to arrange scientific opportunities for some at places like the Institute for
Advanced Study. Thanks in part to his generosity, the best among them eventu-
ally secured professorships at top universities in the United States, the nation
that Japan had ruthlessly attacked on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. That
cohort included Jun-Ichi Igusa (Johns Hopkins), Shoshichi Kobayashi (Berkeley),
Michio Kuga (SUNY Stony Brook), Ichiro Satake (Berkeley), Goro Shimura
(Princeton), and Tsuneo Tamagawa (Yale). My father, who gave a lecture on
orthogonal groups at the meeting, eventually landed a prestigious position at the
Johns Hopkins University.
17
CHAPTER 2
Part of the group photo at the 1955 TokyoNikko conference (Top row: second from left, Jean-
Pierre Serre; third from left, Yutaka Taniyama. Third row: second from left, Takashi Ono. Second
row: on left, Goro Shimura. Bottom row: third from right, Andr Weil)
Anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1940s
18
Coming toAmerica
Every family has its story, and my parents reads like a fairytale. It is the story of a
young starving Japanese couple who sought a better way of life than could be had
in postwar Japan. My father, an aspiring mathematician, impressed the distin-
guished mathematician Andr Weil, who then provided the opportunity of a life-
time, the chance to study and work among the best in America, arranging a research
position at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einsteins institute in the woods.
The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the worlds leading centers for the-
oretical research. It promotes curiosity-driven research in the humanities and
the sciences. The Institute was founded in 1930 by the American educator
Abraham Flexner with funding by the philanthropist businessman Louis
Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Its picturesque campus
occupies eight hundred acres of former farmland outside Princeton, New Jersey.
The Institute consists of four schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural
Sciences, and Social Sciences. However, it is not a school in any usual sense. The
Institute doesnt offer degrees, and it doesnt offer courses. In fact, the Institute
doesnt even have any students. The Institute is a place for deep thought where
roughly thirty permanent faculty members in its four schools, together with vis-
iting scholars, pursue knowledge for its own sake.
The Institute opened with five of the worlds leading mathematicians and
physicists: John Alexander, Albert Einstein, Oswald Veblen, John von Neumann,
and Hermann Weyl. Forty of the fifty-six Fields Medalists and thirty-three Nobel
laureates have been members of the Institute. The Institute is a place where the
worlds best theoreticians think deeply about mathematics and physics without
worrying about real-world applications.
The Institute is difficult to find; you must seek it out. If you visit the quaint
town of Princeton, you will find yourself embraced by the Princeton University
community. But you will see no evidence of the Institute; you wont find promi-
nent signs indicating its location. That is intentional. The Institute is a tranquil
oasis, set apart from the rest of the world in a nature preserve. It is a haven for
brilliant minds. The campus consists of several red brick buildings in the Federal
style connected by paved walkways surrounded by expansive fields and forests,
and a housing complex for visiting scholars designed by the well-known Bauhaus
architect Marcel Breuer.
19
CHAPTER 2
Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study (photo courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study)
My fathers professional story has a happy ending, perhaps even a fairytale

ending. But his path to professional success is but a part of a larger story, one that
raises questions about the price that was paid. My parents never intended to live
their lives separated from their families in Japan. Their original plan was a short-
term stay in America followed by a return to Japan, where they would raise their
family with relatives nearby.
My father made the most of his stay at the Institute. He proved groundbreak-
ing theorems that brought prestigious job offers. The University of Pennsylvania
and Johns Hopkins University competed for his services, and Hopkins won out
in the end after they sweetened their offer by throwing in a Steinway grand
piano. As a result, our family ended up in Lutherville, Maryland, an upper-
middle-class suburb of Baltimore, and the prospect of a return to Japan receded
into the distance. In view of those lucrative offers, compared with the impover-
ished postwar conditions in Japan, it is no wonder that they chose to settle in the
United States.
For many years, my mother held out hope that the family would one day
return to Japan. It is perhaps for this reason that my parents did not become
20
American citizens until 2007, almost fifty years after they came to America.
Obvious challenges accompanied my parents decision to remain in the United
States. They had to learn a new language, and they had to adjust to customs that
were at odds with their Japanese upbringing. On top of such formidable chal-
lenges, they also had to withstand the weighty emotional and psychological toll
of racism.
Life in America in the 1950s and early 1960s for Japanese immigrants was a
harrowing gauntlet, in which they suffered abusive insults and stares from some
of their former enemies. It was a fresh memory in the American psyche that in
1941, Japan had attacked the United States in a brutal act of war, leading to four
years of intense warfare, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs that
destroyed the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At home, in 1942, the American
government responded with the forced relocation and internment of over
100,000 Japanese-Americans.
It is then no surprise that there were deep wounds that bred animosity
between Japanese immigrants and U.S. citizens after World War II.Such unbri-
dled animosity could be found even among senior government officials. In his
testimony before congress in 1943, Lieutenant General John DeWitt
proclaimed,
I dont want any [Japanese] here. They are a dangerous element. There is
no way to determine their loyalty It makes no difference whether he is
an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not
necessarily determine loyalty But we must worry about the Japanese
all the time until he is wiped off the map.
In a public opinion poll published in 1950 by the Institute of Pacific Relations,

thirteen percent of the American public was in favor of the extermination of all
Japanese. Perhaps I shouldnt be surprised by this statistic. After all, the U.S.
military supported the slaughter of innocent Japanese citizens with their fire-
bombing raids and the nuclear annihilation of two major cities. Those actions
saved American lives and brought the war with Japan to an end.
Before 1952, Japanese immigrants were not even allowed to become natural-
ized U.S. citizens. Japanese-Americans were viewed with suspicion at best, and
outright hatred at worst, and that sentiment would take decades to fade away.
My parents arrived in America at a time when Japanese were not welcomed
with open arms. On the contrary, they came to an America where their actions
21
CHAPTER 2
and intentions were viewed with suspicion and disapproval. And they were read-
ily identifiable by their Japanese accents and facial characteristics.
My mother told us stories about mundane trips to the neighborhood grocery
store in which an attempt to buy bread or eggs was an invitation for verbal abuse.
Shoppers would curse them, calling them Jap or Nip, and blame them for war
atrocities such as the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were refused service at gas
stations by attendants who pretended not to understand their accented English.
Such hostility faded over time, and the public perception of Japanese-
Americans improved. Yet they have not vanished completely. In the 1970s and
1980s, anti-Japanese sentiment was displaced onto envy of Japans industrial suc-
cess, such as the rise of the Japanese auto industry at the expense of Detroit, as
portrayed in the film Gung Ho.
In spite of improving attitudes toward Japanese-Americans, there were still
instances of outright criminality. I am old enough to remember several hate
crimes against our family. While most of our neighbors embraced and welcomed
us into their homes, my early childhood in Lutherville, Maryland, in the 1970s
was marred by several racially motivated incidents. Once, the teenaged son of
neighbors shot out the windows of our kitchen. That same young man left a
burning paper bag filled with dog shit on our front porch. During a road trip
through Alabama, we were intentionally rear-ended on the highway. The head-
lights of the attacking drivers car were smashed, and the man forced my parents
to pay for the repairs. It was clear that he was enjoying verbally torturing us
while we waited helplessly and patiently for the repairs to be completed at a
service station.
In the worst incident that I recall, I was the victim. The same wicked neighbor
who shot out our windows together with one of his friends committed a hate
crime against me, a defenseless second-grader, as I was playing in our backyard.
They seized me and dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the forest behind my
house. There they tied me to a tree. They pulled the rotting carcass of a dead bird
from a paper bag, and they shoved it down my back. I can still see that neighbor-
hood teenager, the one who hated us, clad only in cutoff Levis and his trademark
red baseball cap, as he toyed with his Swiss Army knife while asking me whether
I knew what he liked to do to Nips. Then they left me, tied to the tree, in a pile
of dried oak leaves. I was left there in the summer heat for what seemed like
hours, sobbing, while flies gathered. My mother finally found me and brought
me home.
My parents never called the police, and they didnt confront the culprits or
their parents. I thought they were supposed to protect me. I couldnt understand
why they preferred to pretend that nothing had happened. Whom were they
22
supposed to protect, me or my wicked neighbors? Why did they choose to do

nothing at all?
How often must an impressionable child maliciously be called a Chink,
Jap, or Nip before suffering permanent damage? Although such incidents
were infrequent, they are among the most vivid early memories I have from
the early 1970s as one of the few Asian kids in my otherwise all-white
neighborhood.
I never thought of those extreme incidents as anything more than our poor
luck with a few benighted individuals. Now that I reflect back on those events, I
wonder what life must have been like for my parents when they first came to
America. I have heard of no extreme acts of hatred perpetrated against them, but
I am certain that the minor indignities must have been frequent, and the accu-
mulation of such acts was probably more insidious than those few vicious acts
that could be chalked up to a small number of fanatical racists. Perhaps that is
why my parents behavior often seemed like paranoid fear.
I now believe that the circumstances I have been describing are part of the
reason that I was not taught to speak Japanese at home. I cant even count to
fiftyin Japanese. My parents always spoke to me in English, and in my presence,
they always spoke to each other in English. But in private, they always spoke to
each other in Japanese. My parents determined early on that it would be impor-
tant for my future success to be fluent in English, and they did not press me to
learn Japanese. On the contrary, they made no effort whatsoever to teach me to
speak Japanese. They wanted me to be an all-American boy for my own good,
but they had no idea what that actually meant. They must have been believing
and hoping that they could spare me some of the problems they had encoun-
tered as Japanese immigrants trying to make a life for themselves in America.
To this day, my parents continue to lock the doors of the house when they are
home. They do this out of habit and out of fear. I think it is telling that one of the
few Japanese phrases I know is dorobou hairimasu, which translates to hooli-
gans and burglars might enter. I heard this phrase thousands of times as a child,
each time my mother discovered an unlocked door.
Kaikin Home
Growing up, I never thought about the challenges my parents faced raising
a family under such difficult circumstances. What kid in my position would?
World War II was in the distant past, and my parents rarely talked about it.
23
CHAPTER 2
I didnt know anything about the effects of the war and of that widespread belief
in Japan that foreigners, and Americans in particular, were racially inferior. I
wonder what my parents thought about the prospect of raising three boys in a
country they had been taught to despise.
I knew very little about my familys origins. We had no aunts or uncles or
cousins living in America. And we almost never communicated with our rela-
tives in Japan by phone. In fact, I have met my cousins no more than two or three
times in all my forty-seven years. My little nuclear family was on its own. We
were castaways living thousands of miles away in a foreign country with a for-
eign culture and language, surrounded by the very people my parents had been
brought up to believe were the enemy.
It may surprise you to hear that I first learned of my parents arranged mar-
riage when I was in middle school. My parents almost never talked about their
personal lives, and without ties to extended family, there was no reason for the
topic of their marriage to come up, and it never did. Arranged marriages were
common in prewar Japan. Bride and groom were selected by friends or family,
and, like my parents, they were often strangers when they wed.
As a young nisei, I knew next to nothing about being Japanese. For me, being
Japanese was all about food, the meals that my mother prepared at home, and my
physical appearance, so different from that of my neighbors and schoolfellows
straight black hair, flat face, and slanted eyes. With no Japanese friends, I was
constantly aware that I was different, unlike almost everyone I knew.
I was troubled by the fact that we were different from all the other families on
our block. I viewed our habit of locking ourselves in as world-class paranoia.
Indeed, by the early 1980s, our harassing neighbors had moved, and there was
no longer any reason to be afraid.
In recent years, I have changed my opinion. I view the locking of all the doors
when we were at home not as paranoia, but as a symbol of my having grown up
between two cultures: upper-middle-class America and traditional Japan. I went
to school on the outside, in America, while at home, I lived bottled up in isola-
tionist Japan, literally and intentionally locked in to prevent outside influences
from entering.
In retrospect, my home life seems a small-scale version of isolationist Japan
during the Tokugawa period (16411853), when the shoguns, leaders of the
military government, enforced a policy called kaikin, which largely prohibited
contact with foreign countries. The original edict that enforced this policy had
seventeen rules, including one that Japanese who secretly attempted to travel
abroad were to be executed, and any Japanese residing abroad who returned to
Japan were also to be executed.
24
That isolationism ended in 1853, when Commodore Matthew C.Perrys fleet

of ships sailed into Tokyo harbor. The Japanese tried to expel the Americans at
first, viewing them, as I mentioned earlier, as wild beasts, but they eventually
acquiesced to the Americans presence and signed a treaty with the United States
in 1854, bringing an end to the shoguns kaikin. Although isolationism vanished
as an official policy, its underlying principles lived on in the ideologies of subse-
quent Japanese leadership, and it was deeply ingrained in Japanese culture when
my parents were growing up. Some of its effects still reside in them.
Given this culturally pervasive idea of Japanese superiority and the anti-
Japanese racism that my parents experienced in America, it makes sense to me
that my parents would, perhaps unconsciously, enforce a kind of kaikin at home
in quest of self-preservation and protection for themselves and their children.
They had no idea that their actions presented us children with challenges in
our lives on the outside, our lives in America. Why would they? My mother
didnt interact with many Americans. Apart from her housewifely errands, she
spent all of her time occupied with housework and the raising of three boys. My
father was completely engrossed by his mathematics. They knew next to nothing
about the country they lived in, as if they were tourists in a foreign country who
never ventured beyond the gates of their all-inclusive resort.
As a kid with no knowledge of my familys history, I had no way of knowing
all of the forces at play in their parenting. I could only compare our family with
the others in the neighborhood, and it seemed to me and my brothers that we
had gotten a raw deal.
25
Chapter 3

MY CHILDHOOD (19701984)
L
utherville, Maryland, is a hilly network of twisted streets dotted with
nearly identical 1960s-era single-family split-level homes. Our neigh-
borhood was home to baseball legends Mark Belanger, Jim Palmer, and
Brooks Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles. I loved the Orioles. Their victory
over the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1983 World Series is one of the most cher-
ished memories of my life in Lutherville. Little else from my childhood resem-
bles anything that would have been considered normal in my neighborhood.
Ken-chan, Lutherville, Maryland (1970s)
When no one was practicing music, our house was silent. You could hear the
compressor of the fridge unless the dishwasher was running, and once in a while,
you would hear the scraping of Igor the dachshunds paws as he wandered about,
or the quiet thud of my mothers slippers as she did chores. All five of us were
probably at homemy mother at her chores, we boys in our bedrooms, and my
father in his study doing math all day. We always had to be quiet so as not to
disturb my fathers concentration.
My mother, Sachiko, was raised to be a model Japanese housewife, invisibly
running the household in the background. Her education included such refine-
ments as flower arrangement and meal presentation, and for a brief period in
America, those skills were channeled into portrait painting. She has devoted her
entire adult life to Takasan and her three sons.
I know very little about my mothers childhood; she never talked about it.
What I do know is that she ran our home like clockwork. She is the most
dependable person I have ever known, and she never let time get the better of

27
CHAPTER 3
her. For example, even though a permission slip for a school field trip might be
due in two weeks, she would nevertheless sign it the day she received it. She
would pay bills on the day she received them out of fear that something might go
wrong if she waited a few days.
She took her role as a traditional Japanese mother very seriously. She cooked
our meals, did our laundry, and cleaned the house. She performed those chores
almost single-handedly. None of us boys ever had any chores. Every morning,
without fail, I awoke to find a delicious breakfast waiting for me on the kitchen
table. Although my father worked late and slept in, his breakfast was also already
nicely set out for him bright and early, a meal that he would enjoy two or three
hours later. My mother ate her breakfast alone after we boys left for school. After
school, I came home to find that my bed had been neatly made, as were all the
beds. My mothers habits of waking up hours before everyone else and preparing
breakfast and of making all of our beds is indicative of her commitment to the
familys affairs.
The dinners she cooked consisted of delicious Japanese fare, such as chicken
tonkatsu, shrimp tempura, or beef curry, which appeared like clockwork at
6:00 p.m. every day. We would all gather as a family for dinner, often the first
and only time any of us would have seen my father all day. After dinner, he
would retreat to his office and return to whatever mathematical problem was
on his mind.
Taking care of the home and the familys affairs was my mothers full-time job.
She took her role so seriously that she never had time for much of anything else.
In a good year, she might go out to the movies once or twice. She almost never
watched TV.We almost never went out to eat, because it was her job to feed the
family. I have just a couple of memories of her going on an outing with friends.
Apart from her hobby of copying famous paintings, which she pursued only
when I was young, she didnt seem to participate in any activities other than
housework and parenting.
She rarely bought new clothes, and she never went to the beauty salon. Despite
the fact that she had been close to her sisters, she rarely phoned them in Japan.
The long-distance charges were too expensive. She spoke with them at most once
or twice a year.
I cant imagine how she managed to live such a life. It would have driven me
mad. It seemed to me that my mother had no identity and independence apart
from the family. For her, serving the family was her job, her duty.
But it annoyed me terribly that she constantly reminded us how much she was
giving up. She presented herself as a martyr who had sacrificed all self-interest
for the family. I think that this was perhaps her way of instilling in us a sense of
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M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
duty to succeed in the lives that they had planned for us. I certainly didnt want
to feel guilt for not doing my part. But I thought that she should enjoy a better
life and do something for herself once in a while, like all the other mothers in the
neighborhood.
For twenty years, I also misunderstood my fathers role. I thought that his
disinterest in me was somehow a reflection of his low opinion of me. By
comparison, my friends had very different relationships with their fathers,
loving relationships. They would play catch in the yard, go for bike rides, attend
baseball games, and do other normal things. I could see it all from my house,
from behind the windows of my bedroom.
As the only Japanese-American family in our All-American neighborhood,
I had no way of knowing that I was trapped at the confusing and frustrating
intersection of incompatible cultures. I understand my family dynamics much
better now. In traditional Japanese families, it is quite common for fathers to be
almost entirely absent and removed from their childrens lives. The fact is that
Japanese fathers are expected to spend so much time at work that they often
have little time and energy to spend with their children. Japanese companies
place heavy demands on their employees, and as a result, the culture has adapted
by placing the responsibility for raising children and overseeing education
almost entirely on the mothers. The Japanese father is the breadwinner; it is his
duty to provide for the family.
Despite the fact that the father spends little time at home, he is highly regarded
and respected by all members of the family. Childrens positive views of their
fathers are often the result of their mothers efforts to portray their husbands as
someone to be respected and revered. Japanese fathers are often held up as role
models for their sons.
This makes sense to me now. I was indeed brought up to revere my father as
the world-class mathematical genius that he is. Everything we had, we credited
to the importance of his work. And as a theoretical mathematician, most of his
work was done at home, closeted away in his study on the first floor of our house.
He would spend hours on end in his office, behind a closed door, scribbling
crazy-looking formulas on yellow pads of paper. That was his duty. When I was
discussing this recently with my mother, she said, Ninety-nine percent of his
life has been devoted to mathematics, with one percent spared for his family and
hobbies. Make sure to tell people.
This may seem shocking to Westerners, but from the viewpoint of traditional
Japan, it makes sense. As a kid living in America, it made no sense to me. Over
time, I would conclude that the whole unsatisfactory situation was my fault, that
I had done something wrong, and my father had rejected me.
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CHAPTER 3
While my brothers had other gifts, it was clear that my gift was mathematics.
And as tradition would have it, this meant that my father was to be the role
model for his budding mathematician son. Although my relationship with my
father was emotionally detached by Western standards, he was actively involved
in my mathematical education when I was a young boy. All of my cherished
memories from early childhood are related to the bond that mathematics forged
between us.
My parents like to tell the story of how I discovered, at the age of three, that
there are infinitely many numbers. I argued that if it were not so, then there
would have to be a largest number. But that makes no sense, because one could
always add 1 to that largest number to obtain an even larger number. Therefore,
there must be infinitely many numbers.
I have fond memories of sitting at a little kiddie desk in my fathers office
working on geometry problems while he, scribbling at his large steel desk,
worked on his grownup math problems. My father taught me beautiful theorems
by making use of the fun I had in calculating large numbers. When I was still in
elementary school, he taught me Fermats little theorem in this way, and he pre-
sented it to me like a magic trick. It went something like this.
Ken-chan, pick a number that isnt a multiple of 7. Id pick a number, such as
13. Now raise it to the sixth power and subtract 1. Id run around the corner of
his giant steel desk, to my little kiddie desk, and Id work it out by hand. After a
minute or so, Id arrive at the answer: 4,826,808. I bet that it is a multiple of 7.
Ill take that bet, I thought. He has only a 1in 7 chance of being right, and Ill
take those odds any day. And Id run back to my kiddie desk, and I would divide
7 into this large number, and I found that he was right: 4,826,808 = 7 689,544.
Id say something like, You got lucky. Lets do it again.
Ken-chan, pick another number that isnt a multiple of 7. Raise it to the sixth
power and subtract 1. I bet the number you get is a multiple of 7. Now I knew
there had to be a catch, because this time he knew the answer even before I
picked my number. Id then pick a number anyway to humor him, like 29, and Id
run around the big steel desk to my little kiddie desk, and after a few minutes, Id
figure out that 296 1 = 594,823,320 = 7 84,974,760, a multiple of 7, as expected.
I then asked him why the number 7 is so special. And hed respond by picking
another magic number. Ken-chan, pick any number that isnt a multiple of 13.
Raise it to the twelfth power and subtract 1. Id immediately be able to guess
what came next. But Id let him say it anyway. I bet the number you get is a mul-
tiple of 13. I liked manipulating large numbers, but not the supersized ones that
you get by raising to the twelfth power. Sensing that Id figured out the rule, he
then told me Fermats little theorem: If p is a prime number and a is not a
30
M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
multiple of p, then ap1 1 is always a multiple of p. Then he explained a proof.

After all, what we had done only offered evidence of the assertion. For it to be
categorized as a theorem, an undeniable truth, it needed a watertight explana-
tion, a proof, that showed that the statement holds for every prime number p,
not just 7 and 13, and for every number a that is not a multiple of p.
My father enjoyed telling me stories about great mathematicians. I learned
about Euclid, Euler, Descartes, Fermat, Galois, Gauss, Weil, and others. These
giants had written great books, and it seemed that we had all of them. I loved
holding those old books, flipping through the pages, and enjoying their sweet
vanilla scent. Those books were filled with strange symbols and Greek letters like
(tau) and (phi) that seemed freighted with a significance that I could only
guess at. Although I couldnt understand a word of those books, I dreamt that
one day I would be able understand them, and perhaps even write one myself.
My most vivid memory from that time is of my father playing a special cas-
sette tape on his boombox, a static-filled recording of David Hilbert giving a talk
in the 1930s. Hilbert is generally regarded as one of the most influential mathe-
maticians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He was the leader of the Gttingen collective of mathematicians. His students
and collaborators included many famous mathematicians, including Alonzo
Church, Erich Hecke, Emmy Noether, Hermann Weyl, Ernst Zermelo, and John
von Neumann. At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, Hilbert
put forth a list of twenty-three of the most important unsolved problems in
mathematics. That list served as a guide for much of twentieth-century mathe-
matical research. It is considered the most successful and influential list of prob-
lems ever assembled. Mathematicians spent the last century working on those
problems, and along the way, they developed an extraordinarily rich trove of
important mathematical ideas and techniques.
My father treasured the Hilbert audiotape; it remains one of his prized pos-
sessions. It was exciting to watch my father as he listened to Hilberts lecture,
even though I didnt understand a single word. Hed close his eyes as he listened,
doing his best, I supposed, to imagine himself in the lecture hall. For my father,
the tape represented an important historical event, one that he felt was as
momentous as the famous 1877 phonograph recording of Thomas Edison recit-
ing the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb.
The role of mathematics in my early childhood was not confined to our home.
I was identified by Julian Stanley, a famous psychologist at Johns Hopkins, as an
uncommonly talented kid. Stanley was an advocate for the accelerated education
of academically gifted children. I was one of the children he studied in his well-
known Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, a longitudinal survey of
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CHAPTER 3
children who scored 700 or higher on the SAT math test before the age of
thirteenthereby putting them among the top one percent of those taking the
test. Enrolled in his study, I took the SAT several times before the end of middle
school. I was in sixth grade when I scored over 700 on the SAT math section on
my first try. Thanks to that study, I was offered a scholarship, which I declined,
to attend Towson State University the following year.
That is how my life went in elementary school. My mother handled the
day-to-day parenting, and my father, while emotionally detached and consumed
with his mathematics, found a way to offer me love and affection through our
common bond of mathematics. I excelled in elementary school, and I enjoyed
my notoriety as the smart math kid.
Books or Bikes, Lutherville (19761984)
Despite my fond memories of working with my father on mathematics at my

little kiddie desk, I actually never wanted to be a mathematician. That wasnt the
life I wanted; it was the life that others had worked out for me. I had enjoyed the
label as a gifted math student in elementary school, but as I got older, I wanted
to be more like all the other kids in the neighborhood, and they werent doing
math for fun with their fathers. I just wanted to hang out, play baseball, and go
to the movies.
As a middle-school pupil, the numbers I appreciated were to be found not in
mathematics books, but on baseball cards. I was a dedicated collector of Topps
cards, and I put my math skills to use in studying the statistics about the players
depicted on those cards. To this day, I remember a bunch of odd baseball
statistics. For example, the number 388 reminds me of the cherubic face of Rod
Carew, the Minnesota Twin who compiled a league-leading batting average of
.388in 1977, the year he magically approached the elusive .400 barrier, which
has not been breached since Hall of Famer Ted Williams hit .406in 1941.
I dreamt of a life as a NASA astronaut. In middle school, I collected glossy
pictures of Apollo moon missions, writing dozens of letters to NASA requesting
the photos. Carl Sagan, the creator and star of the TV show Cosmos, was my
hero. I read his books, even the ones I had no chance of understanding. I was
very good at math, and I was confident that this meant that I could become a
scientist like Carl Sagan.
Around seventh grade, an awkward age for most boys, I began, like other
boys, to struggle with my identity. Everyones struggle is unique; this was mine:
32
M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
A late bloomer, I was the shortest kid in class. I wore glasses, which was not
fashionable in 1980. I was the only Asian kid in my class. That was already three
strikes against me. But above all, without the maturity to understand that I was
trapped between two cultures, the negative parental voices in my head started
becoming more and more insistent:
Ken-chan, you small and weak You no fit in You must be best
math student You cannot afford people think you stupid There is
no other way.
Although my father was largely absent as a parent, I was aware of his opinions
and concerns regarding me. I learned about them from the conversations I over-
heard between my parents. My parents frequently talked about us in private, and
in our house, which had very thin walls and doors, very few conversations were
actually private. Of course, I didnt understand what they were saying, since they
were speaking Japanese, but I heard my name, so I understood that they were
talking about me, and from their intonation, I could infer that they were
worried.
When my mother would speak with me following such a conversation, I was
annoyed and confused, for it seemed as though my mother was merely the mes-
senger for a higher power. When she criticized me, I always wondered whether
she was expressing her own opinion, or whether perhaps she did not really think
so disparagingly of me and was simply repeating the edicts handed down by my
father. I felt his power over me as an invisible and omnipotent judge, and I began
to crave his praise even more for my accomplishments, which however good
they might be, were never good enough.
When my father occasionally descended from the clouds for some hands-on
parenting, it usually meant that I had done something that merited punishment.
If he had to take time from his important mathematical research, then the stakes
had to be quite high, and I had to be ready for substantial consequences. Such
incidents were rare, but I recall one time when he beat me severely.
When I was twelve years old and in sixth grade at the Hampton Elementary
School, I had the privilege of helping out as an office assistant. I was allowed to
lend a hand in preparing announcements and to help out in other ways in the
school office. The office was a suite of three rooms whose entryway opened into
a waiting room where the receptionist had her desk. Connected to that room
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CHAPTER 3
was the principals office, which I thought of as a torture chamber: kids went
there only when they were in trouble. Then there was the copy room, a debris
field of slotted mailboxes, stacks of reams of paper, large rolls of construction
paper, and a spirit duplicator, generally known as a Ditto machine.
In the late 1970s, Ditto machines were enjoying their last hurrah before the
xerographic copiers that we know today took over. The Ditto machine was a low-
volume duplicator that used alcohol-based inks and a master original that
could be either handwritten or typewritten. The master was a two-ply affair
whose top sheet was the one that was written or typed on, and whose second
sheet was covered in a layer of wax impregnated with ink, usually purple. After
the top sheet had been written or typed on, it was removed, and the waxy sheet,
which now contained an imprint of what had been written on the top sheet,
would be placed on the drum in the printer. Each turn of a crank produced a
copy. Compared to the photocopiers of today, which spew out limitless copies at
the push of a button, those Ditto machines were a pain, and they were messy if
you didnt know what you were doing.
The principal of Hampton, Mrs. May C. Robinson, was a strict and awe-
inspiring executive. That spring, Hampton came under threat of closure. School
budgets were tight, and closing Hampton was proposed as a way to save money.
Mrs. Robinson leaped to the defense of her school. She prepared a carefully
handwritten letter on a master ditto that asked parents to support the school by
protesting the proposed closure. She requested that they sign the letter and
return it to the school to show their support for her petition to keep Hampton
open. Alone in the copy room, I discovered the spirit master, and in an act of
stupid mischief whose obvious consequences I somehow failed to foresee, I van-
dalized the letter. On the line intended for the parents signatures, I wrote
GLORY! Close the fucking school.
Actually, I loved Hampton. I was simply playing an incredibly stupid preado-
lescent prank. The secretary didnt notice what I had done. She innocently dupli-
cated the letter and then distributed the flyers to the teachers. Some of the
teachers sent the flyers home with their pupils before someone noticed what had
been perpetrated.
The next day, I was busted. I readily admitted to my stupid stunt, and I was
prepared to accept my punishment. I was sentenced to a loss of office privileges
and the stool in the corner of Mrs. Robinsons office, one hour each Friday for
the rest of the school year. Her office had glass walls, and so I prepared for the
abject humiliation of being stared at and laughed at by all the kids in school as
they made their way to the lunchroom.
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M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
Despite my admission, my parents refused to believe that I had pulled the

stunt, and they argued with Mrs. Robinson that I was incapable of such an act,
going so far as trying to prove that I didnt know any curse words. They sug-
gested that another student must somehow have coerced me into taking the
blame, despite the fact that the handwriting was clearly mine. They finally
overcame their cognitive dissonance and came to understand that I was the
guilty party. Embarrassed that they had come to my defense, my father scolded
me, and my reward was the severe spanking that I mentioned above.
My parents had come to my defense because they thought that they knew
exactly who I was and what I had in me. They knew that I was incapable of
such misbehavior, which was so remote from the formula that they had estab-
lished that dictated my life. Perhaps my prank was a cry for help, an attempt to
show my parents that I was something more than the x that had to satisfy their
equation. If it was such a cry, it certainly failed in its purpose. I received my
spanking, and life went on as before.
But those formulas required success, and we boys had to do our part to meet
those requirements. My parents believed that Momoro and I had the talent to be
the best, perhaps as an artifact of their upbringing, which promoted the idea
that the Japanese are a superior race. Perhaps they simply couldnt accept the
idea of their children being anything less than the top. They believed that
Momoro could become a world-class pianist, another Vladimir Horowitz, and
that I could become an influential mathematician.
Like any child, I wanted my parents to be proud of me, but if they were, I
never knew it, for their philosophy of parenting left no room for praise. I was
especially sure my father, who played such a small role in day-to-day parenting,
considered me a failure. I had no idea that traditional Japanese families were
different from the American families that were all I had for comparison. How
was I to know? And if I had known, would it have helped? I craved my fathers
approval, a need that would haunt me for decades.
My parents deprived me of almost everything that didnt have an academic
purpose. As I have mentioned, we were the only Asian-American family in our
neighborhood, and so I expected that there would perhaps be some differences
between my family and those of my schoolmates. But I couldnt come to terms
with this degree of isolation and restriction. It seemed a cruel fate. As I got older,
I realized that I had never played catch with my father in the yard. I had never
been allowed to go to a sleepover at a friends house. I wasnt allowed to hang out
with friends on weekend nights. I wasnt allowed to have anything that was part
of a normal American childhood.
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CHAPTER 3
This isolationism also applied to our nonexistent spiritual lives. Although my

mother had shown some interest in joining a church in search of some sort of
community, we had no religious affiliation. My father saw no point to it, and so
my mother was easily outvoted. He didnt believe in God. He didnt believe in
anything he couldnt see or prove. Everything about his worldview depended on
his strong belief that there are no mysteries or sources of wonder in the world
that couldnt be figured out with the help of the scientific method and mathe-
matical logic.
My father joked that the only reason to go to church was as an insurance
policy in the unlikely event that he happened to be wrong about the nonexis-
tence of God and an afterlife that would be denied to heretics like him. He could
understand why people wouldnt want to miss out if the afterlife were pleasant.
But that was not reason enough for him to waste time in church, and as a result,
I was raised an agnostic.
I had no reason to question my father. After all, he was the man who had
conjured a deep and important theory about objects called algebraic tori and
Tamagawa numbers. It seems that he had solved a problem that world experts
had considered unsolvable. If there was a divine figure for the Ono boys, it was
Takasan, our math genius father.
As I reflect on my childhood from the vantage point of middle age, I have
come to believe that my parents became cynical about religion as a result of the
defeat of their spiritual government in World War II, when Emperor Hirohito
was forced to surrender and give up his divine status. What would it take after
that for my parents to open themselves to the possibility of a life of the spirit?
I was thus never exposed to the idea that we are all are part of a larger commu-
nity, each with the responsibility of trying to make the world a better place. Instead,
I grew up to be a cynical adolescent who viewed humanity as a group of people
mindlessly racing and competing with each other for their rightful place. I saw
little beauty in the world, and I certainly didnt recognize anything that inspired
awe and wonder. I almost had no soul. I was body and brain and no heart. It would
be many years before I would recognize how sad such an existence was.
As a freshman at Towson High School, a school that would later claim
Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps among its alumni, I lost my way
and my identity. My transition from middle school to high school destroyed the
little connection I had with life as a teenager living in America. Compared to my
middle school, Ridgely Junior High, Towson High was huge, and to me, its stu-
dents were huge. It was a soulless place that just swallowed you up and spit you
out four years later. I had walked to Ridgely, a freedom that offered me the
opportunity to hang out with friends both before and after school. But I rode the
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M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
My fathers famous paper in the Annals of Mathematics
bus to Towson, and due to the way the school boundaries were set, almost all of
my middle-school friends ended up going to other high schools. The little freedom
I had before was now gone.
With college around the corner, my parents stepped up their tiger parenting.
My life was reduced to a mindless pursuit of first-rate academic credentials.
Any score other than a perfect 800 on that SAT math test would have been a
terrible embarrassment to the family. Any grade below an A would have been a
personal disaster. A class ranking outside the top five would have meant the end
of the world.
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CHAPTER 3
As a sophomore, I also struggled with my identity as one of the few Asians in

school. I understood that I had a physical appearance that was different from
that of most of my classmates and that as the child of immigrants, there were
some cultural differences to be expected between my family and theirs. But it
was too much for me on top of the frustrating and confusing life as the child of
tiger parents to have to deal with hurtful racially motivated teasing. Even though
I understood that none of it was malicious, I still couldnt stand it. I hated being
called Jap or Nip. I hated hearing Oh no, theres Ono. I simply wasnt strong
enough to embrace my heritage. I wanted to be accepted, and the teasing made
me feel isolated, different. It would be many years before I could live comfortably
with my Japanese heritage. At the time, I was simply embarrassed. Why did I
have to have parents with strong foreign accents? Why did I have to be the kid
with the strange last name? Why did I have to be the straight-A student whose
parents expected and demanded more? What did I have to do to finally earn love
and respect from my father? I desperately wished to be someone else, almost
anyone else. I had become a pitiful loner who walked the halls of school head
down, wishing I was invisible.
Those feelings were compounded by my having been labeled a gifted and tal-
ented student, one of a tiny cohort of kids identified by the Baltimore County
Public Schools for our ability to ace standardized tests. We took all of our classes
together, and we marched from class to class as a group as if under quarantine.
My social role in school was clear. I was the archetypal Asian-American nerd.
Being marked out as gifted was no comfort to me, nor was I comforted by the fact
that my classes were easy for me. I hated almost everything about high school.
I was being crushed under the high expectations set for me at home, which
had always been more crucible than nest but now was unbearably so. How could
it have been otherwise? My parents owed all of their success to my fathers prow-
ess as a mathematician. Their few friends were other professors with overachiev-
ing children who were being accepted by top private colleges and winning elite
music competitions. The way my parents raved about them, those professors
kids were models of perfection. How could I even think about measuring up? I
had to get into a college like Princeton or MIT; the local state university would
have been a humiliation. It was all or nothing. The pressure of trying to live up
to those paragons was overwhelming.
Under those suffocating circumstances, I lost interest in school. I lost hope
that I could amount to much of anything. I had been taught that every worthy
scientist solved problems that nobody before them could crack. I had learned
that accomplished young scientists must earn the endorsement of a master scien-
tist, someone to do for them what Andr Weil had done for my father and other
38
M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
young Japanese mathematicians in the 1950s. I had learned that one could reach
the highest level of honor and respect by overcoming formidable obstacles, such
as isolation and poverty.
And here I was with no obstacles, no excuses, yet no chance of reaching any
level of honor or respect. I wasnt starving. I wasnt subsisting on meager bowls of
rice while trying to stay alive in a world of smoke and fire. And yet I didnt have
a prayer of replicating my fathers formula for success through mathematics. But
I had no choice. It was the path that had been laid down for me. I had been brain-
washed into believing that there was no other way for me to have a happy life. It
was actually worse than that: I had been brainwashed into not even thinking
about what might constitute a happy life. It never occurred to me that I might
step outside my preordained formula into something of my own choosing.
Yet I somehow realized that I was going to go mad if I didnt find something
positive in my life. I needed an escape, something outside of grades and exams
to live for. In seventh grade, I discovered cycling. When I was on my bike, life
became simpler, with all its complications reduced to pedaling, watching where
I was going, and feeling the liberating wind in my face. Two years later, halfway
through ninth grade, cycling became an addiction. I took up bike racing, and
soon nothing else in my life seemed to matter. At first, I belonged to a small rec-
reational racing club. But the following year, emboldened by my success in
defying my parents by quitting the violin, I audaciously stepped up my training
and joined the best team in the area. My will was so strong that there was noth-
ing my parents could have done to dissuade me from pursuing my new passion.
Of course, they tried to make me give it up:
Ken-chan, Good students no have time for bicycle riding It dangerous. You
could get killed It take too much time So much exercise kill you You
will get so tan that you will look like obake, a zombie.
I listened, but I refused to yield. I lived for the thrill of hurtling down steep
hills in a tight aerodynamic tuck. I loved the harmony that I experienced with
my machine when I climbed long steep hills out of the saddle, as if we were in a
spirited dance. I cherished the mental freedom that I felt after pedaling miles
and miles over the rolling hills that populate the landscape north of Baltimore.
In my mind, I raced famous cyclists, such as Eddy Merckx and the budding
American star Greg Lemond. I did all this to drown out the painful voices that
haunted me when I wasnt riding.
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CHAPTER 3
To pay for this expensive sport, I worked part-time at Valley Pharmacy as a

stock boy earning minimum wage. I swept the floors, stocked the soda machine,
and delivered prescriptions to customers, one of whom, to my surprise and
delight, was Johnny Unitas, the retired Hall of Fame quarterback who had played
for the Baltimore Colts from 1956 to 1972.
I lived for cycling, and much like David Stohler, the teenage protagonist in
Breaking Away, the 1979 film about a cycling-obsessed boy coming of age, I was
at odds with a father who didnt understand me.
I raced for the Charm City Velo Team, an elite group of local bike racers,
alongside my high-school friends David Lanham and Greg Asner. To my par-
ents, such friends were anathema, kids who would never amount to much, and
they were never allowed to enter our house. My parents predictions notwith-
standing, both of these cycling buddies would achieve success. David has enjoyed
a distinguished career in the military, and Greg is a well-known environmental
scientist at Stanford.
We had sharp-looking team kits that included red-and-green skintight Lycra
jerseys. We wore sleek sunglasses, and I was the first to get a pair of supercool
Oakleys. The first models were more like face shields, and they made me look
like Darth Vader, which was fine with me, since I hoped to inspire fear in my
racing opponents.
Goofing off before a race
40
M Y C H I L DHO OD (19 70 19 8 4)
Several of our older teammates were college students at Johns Hopkins. When I
first joined the team, I had the naive hope that my parents would somehow
approve of cycling because I was in the company of Hopkins students. I hoped
that they would approve of these friends and somehow support me in my chosen
sport. Those hopes vanished quickly. Neither of my parents ever uttered a posi-
tive word about cycling. They never attended any of my races. They never even
asked about them. They probably had no idea, if they even thought about it,
where I had been, for we raced as far away as Pennsylvania and Virginia.
My friend Peter Verheyen, who would attend my wedding in 1990, was one of
my teammates who understood me and sympathized with my situation. He was
a strong student at Hopkins, a top regional bike racer, and he was also the son of
a Hopkins professor. He was more than a teammate; he became a confidant and
older brother. Like my seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Sprankle, Peter gave me
much-needed nurturing.
Pat Liu, a biology major at Hopkins who earned a medical degree from the
University of Pennsylvania, was our teams star sprinter. In 1983, Pat won the
National Capital Open, an important bicycle race held each year in Washington,
D.C., on the Ellipse, the one-kilometer-long street in Presidents Park between
the Washington Monument and the White House. I enjoyed drafting behind Pat
on our training rides, because his large frame created a nice slipstream that
reduced my workload, and I was mesmerized by the sight of the veins in his
calves that popped out like pencils when he pushed hard against the pedals.
I lived for our weekend group training rides and road trips, and I enjoyed the
fact that our team was really good. My cycling friends became my source of
strength and self-esteem. Bike racing kept me sane by providing an escape from
my isolationist home and the burden of impossible parental expectations.
On my long solo training rides in the spring of 1984, I plotted my escape, my
metaphorical seppuku, the ancient Japanese ritual suicide practiced by samurai
who had brought shame upon themselves and their families. I had decided to
drop out of high school and leave Lutherville in order to escape my hopeless
circumstances. I would start life anew, somewhere, somehow, consigning my
former life to a black hole of forgetfulness. Although I didnt have a concrete
plan, there was no way that I was going to graduate from Towson High School.
Nothing would change my mind about that, even if it meant having to live on
the streets.
41
CHAPTER 3
Ono Family mid 1980s (left to right: Takasan, Ken, Santa, Momoro, my mother with Igor)
I tried to convince my mother that dropping out was a good decision. I argued
that staying in high school was a waste of time. The classes were too easy, I said,
and I hated them. I also argued that I could get into a top college without a high-
school diploma. My mother, however, maintained that it was an absurd idea, and
she fought with me for months:
Ken-chan, if you drop out then never come back to this house You will
disgrace family, even worse than now with your tan face and long hair
Why you want punish us after all we done?
I never explained the real reason for wanting to drop out: I was suffocating.
I was desperately seeking freedom and independence. I couldnt take the daily
barrages of criticism without any hope of meeting my parents expectations.
I had reached a breaking point.
42
Chapter 4

AN UNEXPECTED LETTER
Lutherville, Maryland (April 7, 1984)
M
y legs are on fire. Im fighting to spin the pedals of my svelte French
Peugeot racing bicycle in a desperate effort to keep pace with Belgian
cycling champion Eddy Merckx. Were battling mano a mano, rac-
ing up the switchbacks of Mont Ventoux, the Giant of Provence, a cruel peak
that had claimed the life of British champion Tom Simpson during the 1967 Tour
de France. Were racing for the finish line, a strip of white paint in the steep road
at the summit, a desolate place marked by a decaying weather station. Merckx,
known as the Cannibal because of his insatiable appetite for victories, sets an
infernal pace. Somehow, Im able to keep up, while one by one, all the others have
fallen behind. The finish is finally in sight, and the fans are in a frenzy. Despite the
overwhelming pain and self-doubt building inside me, I summon all my remain-
ing strength. I rise out of the saddle and swing my Peugeot side to side in a furi-
ous sprint. And wondrous to relate, I leave the Cannibal in my wake.
I am in a trance. I am not actually in Provence. In reality, I am training for
next weekends National Capital Open, a race that Pat won last year with a
ferocious sprint. My solo training rides are mental and physical adventures.
They are my first experiments in deep meditation and visualization. I will even-
tually learn that I am at my best in a trancelike state, where I enjoy a union of
body, mind, and soul.
Its a gorgeous brisk Saturday morning, April 7, 1984, and I have been riding
my fancy French racing bicycle in the picturesque rolling countryside north of
Baltimore among attractive manicured horse farms. Clad in wool cycling shorts,
a yellow jersey, cleated Italian cycling shoes, and a flimsy hairnet helmet, I am a
sixteen-year-old Japanese-American version of the kid David Stohler from the
movie Breaking Away.

43
CHAPTER 4
I eventually pull into our driveway on Welford Road and dismount. I walk to
the mailbox; I hobble, actually, on account of my cleated cycling shoes, which
emit a jaunty clip-clop on the sidewalk. I open the mailbox, and inside, I see a
delicate yellowed rice-paper envelope covered with exotic stamps. It is addressed
to my father, Professor Takashi Ono. That letter is going to change my life,
though it will take me ten years to understand its message.
Exhausted from my ride, I blink to clear away the beads of sweat that are drip-
ping from my eyebrows. This allows me to make out the strange letter. The
stamps tell me that the letter is from India, and the postmark makes it precise: it
is from Madras. With the curious letter in hand, I ring the front doorbell so that
my mother will know to unlock the steel front door and the outside screen door
to let me into our crucible of a home.
My two older brothers no longer live at home. Momoro is now attending the
Juilliard School of Music on scholarship. Santa is also away; he is a senior at the
University of Chicago, where he is just about to graduate with a degree in biol-
ogy. He will repudiate his predetermined path and outgrow his role as the black
sheep of the family by earning faculty positions at the Harvard and Johns
Hopkins Medical Schools. He will later be named the twenty-eighth president of
the University of Cincinnati.
I am much younger than both of my brothers, and so I have essentially been
brought up in their wake as an only child, single-handedly by my mother.
Momoro left home at an early age to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia, a boarding school for gifted musicians, and I have few memories
of life with him at home.
Still in my cycling shoes, I hobble down the flight of stairs to my fathers office,
where he is busy, as always, scribbling mathematical formulas on yellow pads of
paper while listening to a transistor radio softly playing classical music. I hand
him the curious envelope without a second thought.
After lunch, my father calls me into his library, my former bedroom, which is
now covered wall to wall with math books and is dominated by a large refectory
table stacked high with papers and books. He is holding the letter from India in
his hand, and although he is ordinarily a stoic and almost emotionless man, I can
tell by the look on his face that he has been deeply moved by the letter. Im not
sure, but I get the sense that there are tears in his eyes.
The letter is typewritten on delicate rice paper, and the letterhead features a
rust-colored sketch of a serious-looking Indian man whose thick hair is parted,
Western style, on the left side.
For my father to take even a few minutes away from his mathematics, this
letter must be important. Ken-chan, I have to tell you an amazing story about
this letter.
44
A N U N E X PE C T E D L E T T E R
Janaki Ammals letter
45
CHAPTER 4
Dear Sir,
I understand from Mr. Richard Askey, Wisconsin, U.S.A., that you have
contributed for the sculpture in memory of my late husband Mr. Srinivasa
Ramanujan. I am happy over this event.
I thank you very much for your good gesture and wish you success in all your
endeavours.
Yours faithfully,
S.Janaki Ammal
My father explains to me what the letter is about. The letter is from Janaki
Ammal, a destitute Indian woman in her eighties who lives in Madras (now
known as Chennai). She thanks my father for his gift, a donation that helped
fund the commissioning of a bust of her late husband, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a
man who had died in 1920.
Despite living in near poverty for over sixty years, rejected by her husbands
family, the forgotten brokenhearted widow had only one request when a reporter
found her living in a Madras slum in the early 1980s. She had been promised a
statue to honor her husband at the time of his death. The promise had not been
kept. She desperately wanted a statue erected to honor her husbands memory.
Janaki Ammal in 1987
46
A N U N E X PE C T E D L E T T E R
After reading about this in an Indian newspaper, Dick Askey, who would later
become one of my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, solicited donations
from the mathematicians of the world in a massive fundraising campaign. He
used the proceeds to commission sculptor Paul Granlund to fashion a bust of
Ramanujan. Askey came through and fulfilled the broken promise, and my
father was one of the many mathematicians who made a contribution.
Granlunds bust
of Ramanujan
I ask, Whos this guy Ramanujan? What did he do?

My father tells me the most incredible story, about the life of Srinivasa
Ramanujan. It is the story of an Indian man who overcame incredible odds to
become one of the most romantic and influential figures in the history of math-
ematics. It is the story of a self-taught dropout whose ideas came to him as
visions from a goddess. It is the story of a man who had the courage to send his
ideas to random mathematicians at the University of Cambridge, and then to
accept the invitation of a world-class mathematician who recognized his genius
and travel halfway around the world to work with him in England. It is the story
of a man who suffered racial prejudice as he strove for accomplishment and rec-
ognition. It is a story of a man who would then die tragically at the young age of
thirty-two.
47
CHAPTER 4
I am stunned by this tender story. I am also surprised that this short letter,
which is really no more than a form letter, has stirred up such deep emotions in
my father, a man I thought had feelings only for numbers and formulas.
However, I recognize at once that Ramanujans biography mirrors my fathers
life in many ways. Both men are self-taught creative geniuses. Both men escape
poverty thanks to the generosity of a world-class mathematician who offers the
opportunity to work with the worlds best in a foreign land. And both men are
rewarded for their achievements despite the indignities and hindrances to suc-
cess that they suffer due to racial prejudice.
48
Chapter 5

MY ESCAPE
R
amanujans story, as told to me by my father, offered me, a teenager
about to drop out of high school to escape a frustrating and confusing
life, hope that like him, I could perhaps accomplish something in my
life. I was encouraged by the fact that the dropout had achieved not only success
but greatness, and I was made hopeful by the fact that the dropouts parents con-
tinued to support him despite his troubles. Most of all, I was stunned that my
father held this college dropout in such high regard; he revered this man as some
kind of demigod. I found that odd, because my father didnt believe in anything
that he couldnt see or prove, and Ramanujan seems to have had a significant
mystical side to his personality. I wondered how he reconciled Ramanujans claim
of inspiration through visions of the goddess Namagiri with his personal beliefs.
Although I didnt have much confidence that I would ever earn the praise and
respect of my parents, Ramanujans story offered a glimmer of hope. It showed
me that there might be a way to earn my parents respect that didnt require fol-
lowing the rigid script that they had written for methe single-minded pursuit
of academic credentials.
I had decided to take my chances and reject my parents rigid formula for suc-
cess, just as I had quit the violin cold turkey, and just as I had chosen to race
bicycles against their wishes. But I still wanted parental approval. I wanted my
parents to accept my decision.
For them, earning a high-school degree is a minor achievement that isnt
worth celebrating. After all, the vast majority of kids graduate, so whats the big
deal? And so paradoxically, it was my parents low regard for high school that
kept my argument in favor of dropping out alive.
In a last-ditch effort, after months of heated shouting matches, I played the
Ramanujan card. I offered him as a role model, a successful dropout whom my

49
CHAPTER 5
parents understood and revered. I had no expectation that they would accept
such a flimsy argument after rejecting every other justification I could throw at
them, but to my surprise, my father, who almost never expressed a firm opinion,
soon agreed that I didnt need to finish high school to get into a top college.
Although my mother didnt believe a word of it and remained firmly opposed to
my plans, she was once again outranked. And thus it was that my parents,
exhausted from my arguments and our earlier battles over the violin and cycling,
gave me, if not their blessing, at least their permission to make my escape.
I was astounded that my ploy, offering Ramanujan as an example of a success-
ful dropout, had worked. I couldnt believe it. I had offered someone who was
nothing like myself, a man who had lived in a faraway country in a faraway time,
and who was producing astounding original research when he dropped out of
college. Surely I, who was dropping out of high school having produced nothing,
wasnt in the least like him.
What made my father give in? I turned the mystery over and over in my mind.
I finally decided that he had simply become exhausted from our endless battles.
I supposed that he had relented just to get rid of me and finally have some peace
and quiet. But I was wrong, though a dozen years would pass before I discovered
the real reason.
A few months later, with my parents resigned to my decision, I moved out.
They dropped me off at Penn Station in Baltimore, where I boarded a train
bound for Montreal. I had my fancy Peugeot, and some clothes stuffed in an old
blue canvas suitcase held together with duct tape.
Who would have thought that some long-dead Indian dude named Ramanujan
would be the talisman that would unlock the door of my cell? I had no way of
knowing then that I would be hearing a lot more from that miraculous mathe-
matician, that one day I would be drawn to search for the source of his mathe-
matics, a search that would finally let me come to terms with my tough-loving
Japanese tiger parents.
50
Part II
The Legend of Ramanujan
Chapter 6

LITTLE LORD
Kumbakonam, India (1890s)
C
rowds ramble by on foot and rickshaw on this busy dirt road lined
with small shops and peddlers seated on blankets selling vegetables,
silks, tin plates, and almost anything else you might imagine. Most of
the people are thin Indians clad in light, loose-fitting garments. Once in a while,
a British officer or administrator passes by in a khaki uniform or formal suit.
Cows and goats roam freely, eating whatever scraps and waste they can find in
this hot and humid place. This is Sarangapani Street in late-nineteenth-century
Kumbakonam, a town in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Ramanujans
childhood home.
The year is 1887, and Komalatammal, Srinivasa Ramanujans mother, has left
her husband behind in Kumbakonam to travel the 150 miles west to her moth-
ers home in Erode to give birth to her first child. She is a corpulent, authoritar-
ian woman who, like my mother, runs her household with little assistance from
her husband, who works as a clerk in a fabric store. And so it was in Erode, on
December 22, 1887, that Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was born. A year later,
mother and son returned home to Kumbakonam.
Srinivasa was the babys fathers name, and Iyengar indicated his high priestly
Brahmin caste. His father was K.Srinivasa Iyengar, and so the future mathemati-
cian would be known throughout his life simply as Ramanujan (the emphasis is
on the middle syllable, Rah-MAN-ujan), the only part of his name that was
uniquely his. The name derives from the Indian mythological hero Rama, on
whose life and deeds the famous Indian epic the Ramayana is based. His doting
mother, however, referred to him throughout his life by the endearing nickname
Chinnaswami, which means Little Lord. And despite the familys poverty, he
grew up like one.

53
CHAPTER 6
Map of South India (drawn by Aspen Ono)
Like another genius, Albert Einstein, born eight years earlier, Ramanujan
began to talk unusually lateto the point that his parents worried whether he
would ever be able to communicate. His mother feared that he was deaf, and
following a suggestion made by a friend of her fathers, he was made to study the
characters of the Tamil languagethus learning to read before he ever opened
his mouth to speak. Finally, having memorized the characters of this ancient,
linguistically pure Dravidian language, Ramanujan began to sound them out,
and finally began to talk.
54
L I T T L E L OR D
Ramanujans mother, Komalatammal
Ramanujans father was rarely homeleaving early in the morning and

returning home late in the eveningand like my father, he paid little attention
to his son. Ramanujan was raised by his strong-willed mother, who helped him
with his schoolwork and even advocated on his behalf by complaining volubly to
the school principal whenever she was unhappy with how her son was being
treated in school. Ramanujan grew to be a willful child who rarely agreed to do
anything that didnt suit his wishes, and he routinely ignored instructions from
teachers and school administrators, indeed from anyone in authority. He was
also exceptionally sensitive, taking offense where it may not have been intended,
and possessing a perfectionistic attitude and a keen sense of shame. For him, any
personal failure, however slight, was followed by severe mental anguish. If one of
his classmates achieved a higher score on an exam in an area that he believed he
understood better, Ramanujan would agonize over his defeat.
55
CHAPTER 6
Komalatammal would later give birth to three more children, but all of them
died shortly after birth. That, unfortunately, was far from an unusual circum-
stance. Many children born in south India in that period died at birth or at a
young age. Other children would be born to the family many years later, after
Ramanujan had reached young adulthood, and so he was raised virtually as an
only child.
His mother, like mine, held a part-time job. She worked in a temple choir,
singing hymns to the local goddess. This gave the family some much-needed
extra income to supplement the fathers meager earnings. The family was poor,
but richer than the average family in the peasant class of south India. As
Brahmins, members of the highest Indian caste, they lived with pride despite
their economic difficulties.
Kumbakonam, which had about fifty thousand inhabitants at the time, is
located within a vast agricultural region watered by the Cauvery Rivera water
source considered almost as holy as the famous Ganges hundreds of miles to the
north. Mosquitoes proliferated in this area of ample standing water, and so
malaria, a scourge that kills the young as well as the oldwas rampant. So were
many other diseases. A smallpox epidemic raged in this region in 1889, when
Ramanujan was two years old, killing thousands of children. The boy fell seri-
ously ill, but he beat the odds and survived.
Just before reaching the age of five, Ramanujan enrolled in school in
Kumbakonam. He disliked school. With the personality of a Little Lord, it was
not easy for him to accept authority, and because he was an exceptionally bright
child, his mind was logical and critical, and he was particularly unwilling to do
anything that was asked of him for which he could see no good reason. Like me,
he excelled in mathematics, and during this time in his schooling he was strong
in all of his subjects, and he gained skills that would prove useful in later life.
One of those skills was proficiency in English. Only about a tenth of the popula-
tion of India at that time had good command of the English languagewhich
was important for communication among the peoples in the subcontinent, who
spoke well over one hundred different major native languages, most of them
Dravidian or Indo-Aryan in origin. A proficiency in English opened up for a
young person the possibility of obtaining a job in the civil service or some other
well-paying profession.
A month before his tenth birthday, Ramanujan took exams in Tamil, English,
geography, and arithmetic. He scored first in the entire district and was praised
for his outstanding performance. That achievement enabled him to enroll in the
local high school, Town High, one of the best schools in the area. Classes were
taught in English, which was a great advantage to its students.
56
L I T T L E L OR D
Already in the second year of high school, Ramanujan became known for
his mastery of mathematics, and students from the school would often come
to him for help with problems. In mathematics, he reigned supreme, and his
knowledge quickly approached that of his teachers. Through books he had
obtained, Ramanujan learned a great deal of trigonometry, geometry, and
algebra on his own.
Under the overbearing guidance of his mother, Ramanujan emerged as a
headstrong and brilliant ten-year-old. He so excelled in his studies that nobody
would have believed that the day would come when school would be a struggle
for him.
57
Chapter 7

A CREATIVE GENIUS
J
ust like the kids I knew from Julian Stanleys John Hopkins study of tal-
ented children, Ramanujan was identified at an early age for his gifts in
mathematics. Like us, he was capable of flying through the usual mathe-
matics curriculum. However, where we had a knack only for understanding for-
mulas, he had a knack for creating them.
On his own, Ramanujan was able to see past the formulas to the theory behind
them. Indeed, he quickly exhausted the mathematical knowledge of his teachers
at school and began to read books on mathematics independently, which he
obtained from two university students who boarded with his family, who
welcomed the additional income, which supplemented what Srinivasa was
making as a clerk and what Komalatammal was paid for her temple singing.
As Ramanujan was growing up, Komalatammal was spending less and less
time with the choir, feeling that she needed to focus on nurturing her young
lord. More than anyone else, she understood how brilliant her son was, and she
would spend hours teaching him about the world, educating him at home in
ways that were more suited to his personality than the rigid rote instruction that
he was receiving at school. She played intellectual games with him, took him on
long walks by the river, and even consulted with him about her own life. They
were exceptionally close.
Ramanujan quickly devoured the books lent to him by the two boarders,
teaching himself so much that he had now advanced well beyond what the teach-
ers at his school could offer. And he began to go beyond the mathematics pre-
sented in the books he had been given, developing his own ideas about
trigonometry, geometry, number theory, and infinite series.
In 1900, while only in the second year of secondary school (corresponding to
our seventh grade), Ramanujan began to figure out on his own how to work with
infinite series, that is, how to efficiently represent the sum of infinitely many

59
CHAPTER 7
terms, which may or may not represent a unique finite number. Infinite series
and continued fractions would become an obsessive occupation for him
throughout his lifeas they would, decades later, in my own work.
While still a child, Ramanujan was fast becoming an expert on those seem-
ingly intractable mathematical entities. He spent more and more of his time try-
ing to understand how infinite series work, which ones converge and which ones
do not. He would soon find a method that allowed him to add up all of the posi-
tive integers, that is, the expression 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + , and obtain a finite
negative number! As crazy as this claim appears to be, one can make complete
sense out of it, and it requires important theorems by some of the worlds great
mathematicians, including Jacob Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, and Bernhard
Riemann, on a subject called the analytic continuation of the Riemann zeta
function. The young, untrained Ramanujan had somehow obtained glimpses of
the work of Bernoulli, Euler, and Riemann on his own.
Ramanujan had such an amazing aptitude for mathematics that by age twelve,
he had worked out new solutions to problems in number theory and analysis.
Astonishingly, he was able to come up with mathematical facts and ideas in what
was close to an intellectual vacuum.
India had a long tradition, going back to the early Middle Ages, of producing
important mathematical results without proof. And like some other Indian
mathematicians, Ramanujan cared little about formal proof. He simply derived
beautiful mathematics as if out of thin airmostly identities and equations.
In 1902, he learned about the method that Italian mathematicians had discov-
ered in the sixteenth century for solving the cubic equation, and he derived on
his own a method for the solution of quartic, or fourth-degree, equations
repeating a variation of a feat performed brilliantly by Ren Descartes three cen-
turies earlier (though Descartes was much older at the time than Ramanujan).
Ramanujan managed not to antagonize his teachers too much while still in
school. But his mathematical prowess was growing without bound and consum-
ing more and more of his time. Like Descartes, Galois, and Einstein, Ramanujan
became known in his school as a math genius. He kept winning awards for excel-
lence, and in 1904, he won the K. Ranganatha Rao Prize in mathematics. In
announcing the honor to the gathered teachers and students, the principal,
K.Iyer, described Ramanujans abilities in mathematics as being above an A+
level. At his graduation from Town High, Ramanujan won a scholarship to
attend Government College, an excellent institute of higher education in
Kumbakonam, considered by some the Cambridge of the region. At
60
A C R E AT I V E GE N I US
Government College, Ramanujan continued to perform amazingly well in math-

ematics, but he now began to do poorly in everything else. There was an unusual
reason why this brilliant student, who was far better than everyone else around
him in mathematics and whose knowledge exceeded even that of his teachers,
stopped showing even minimal interest in any other subject.
61
Chapter 8

AN ADDICTION
I
magine a college student who is so consumed by video games that he is
failing all his classes. He even forgets to eat, shower, and sleep. If we
replaced the video games by equations and formulas, then this would have
been Ramanujan.
During the last few months of his time at Town High School, Ramanujan
became obsessed with mathematics. So much so, in fact, that had the obsession
taken hold of him earlier, he might have jeopardized his graduation, because his
addiction left room for nothing else in his life, no other subject whatsoever.
What triggered his strange state of mind was a book published in 1886 titled A
Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics, by George Shoobridge Carr.
Carr was a professional mathematics tutor in London, and he had decided to put
in book form all the formulas, theorems, and results known during his time that
would be useful in tutoring English mathematics students.
A friend had borrowed a library copy of this book for Ramanujan, and it is
this book that appears to have unleashed Ramanujans true genius, and it has
thus played an unlikely role in the history of mathematics. Carr was by no means
a great mathematician, and his booka compendium of results known in his
timewas later described by the mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy (who
will play a major role in this story) in a 1937 article on Ramanujan as follows:
The book is not in any sense a great one, but Ramanujan has made it
famous, and there is no doubt that it influenced him profoundly and that his
acquaintance with it marked the real starting point of his career.

63
CHAPTER 8
Carrs book contained 6165 theorems and mathematical formulas, beginning

with relatively simple ones, such as a 2 - b2 = ( a + b ) ( a - b ) , and continuing to
increasingly more complicated results. The characteristic trait of this book
unlike others that Ramanujan had read while in schoolwas its extreme terse-
ness. The Synopsis contained few details of proofs. This had the distinct effect of
encouraging Ramanujan to find proofs himself, and thus to develop his own
mathematical chops. Within monthsat which time he was a scholarship stu-
dent at a prestigious local collegeRamanujan had become hooked on Carr and
could focus on nothing else.
While Carrs highly condensed book allowed Ramanujans genius to emerge
because he felt the need to supply the details in the theorems, and thus to explain
to himself the reasoning behind the results Carr had presented, it had several
negative effects. First, Carr had begun tutoring in the 1860s, and what he was
preparing his pupils for was the Tripos examination, which required a great deal
of rote learning of basic material that university students needed to know to
obtain a bachelors degree. None of this was cutting-edge mathematics. Thus
Ramanujans introduction to modern mathematics was not at all modern. It
may have given him a wrong impression about the state of the artlike my father
in Japan at the end of World War II, he was isolated from current trendsand
when, some years later, he would greatly extend the formulas in Carrs book,
thinking perhaps that he was doing highly original work, it would appear to oth-
ers that he was simply appropriating known facts and passing them off as his own.
Second, the books extreme tersenessit was, after all, primarily a collection
of mathematical facts that an undergraduate would need to knowmay have
given Ramanujan the false impression that this was how mathematics was done
in the wider world, namely that there was no need of formal argumentation.
Thus, when Ramanujan began to create his own mathematics, he, too, would
provide no justifications for his results in the form of detailed derivations, as had
become custom in mathematical writing since the mid-nineteenth century.
The third problem with the book was perhaps the most unfortunate of all. It
was too absorbing, too fascinating, and it deprived Ramanujan of the chance for
a solid education. He discovered the book in late 1903, and he became totally
obsessed with it. He spent all his time trying to supply the mathematical details
left out by Carr.
Ramanujan managed to coast during his last few months of high school with-
out slipping too badly in any subject, even though he was spending all his time
on his mathematical derivations and extensions of Carrs material. He received
his awards and a scholarship, which was badly needed, since his parents income
was much too low to afford him a college education.
64
A N A DDIC T ION
Ramanujan entered Government College in 1904. From the outset, his situa-
tion was not auspicious. He continued to do nothing but mathematics. Nothing
else interested him. He would sit in class, pretending to listen to the lecturer,
with Carrs Synopsis in his lap, his mind deep in thought about an infinite series
or an infinite continued fraction. To what did these series or fractions converge?
he would ask himself, completely unaware whether the professor was talking
about the history of India or a Shakespearean tragedy. There was a curriculum
that he was supposed to be following, but Carrs book, and the flood of mathe-
matical ideas that it inspired, had eclipsed everything else.
Ramanujan was just a teenager, but he was already developing original
research based on what he was reading. Of course, he was working in a relative
mathematical desert, for despite its prestige in southeast India, Government
College, with its mere dozen lecturers, was an intellectual backwater. Although
unaware of what was known or unknown beyond the pages of Carrs book, and
although some of Ramanujans results, while original to him, were well known to
the mathematical world, some of his results were new, often going beyond those
obtained by some of the worlds great mathematicians, such as the brilliant
eighteenth-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, arguably the most
prolific mathematician of all time, whose collected mathematical papers fill
about ninety volumes.
So although Ramanujan dutifully attended the required lectures, his mind
was elsewhereengrossed in the riddles of Carrs book, and quite unmindful of
what was going on around him, as a classmate later described him to one of
Ramanujans biographers. Although in high school he had excelled in many sub-
jects, including English, he now failed his English composition paper, and as a
result, he lost his scholarship. His mother went to the head of the college to
plead, beg, cajole, and complain. But the scholarship was not reinstated.
Ramanujan remained in school a few months longer, but without the scholar-
ship, college was unaffordable. Torn between family loyalty, love of mathematics,
the desire to please, and the pull of a greater force, Ramanujan was lost. He did
the only thing he could, something with which I readily sympathize: he ran away
from home. He took a train to the distant town of Vizagapatnam, seven hundred
miles up the coast, leaving without a word at the beginning of August 1905. His
family made frantic inquiries. They advertised and posted notices for their miss-
ing son, and they soon found him and brought him home.
Ramanujan attempted to return to university to continue his education. In
1906, he traveled the two hundred miles by train to Madras, arriving dazed and
confused, but eventually making his way to Pachaiyappas College, where he
hoped to study and obtain his degree. Here, the experience from Kumbakonam
65
CHAPTER 8
repeated itself: Ramanujan excelled beyond expectations in mathematicseas-

ily surpassing the knowledge of his professors, who held him in awe. But he just
couldnt concentrate on his other subjects. He failed his physiology exam mis-
erably several times, and eventually had to withdraw from the college without
a degree.
66
Chapter 9

THE GODDESS
M
athematically talented children are frequently identified as such by
their ability to perform very large calculations rapidly. Ramanujan
was a prodigious calculator, but what set him apart was his creativ-
ityhis ability to conjure never before imagined mathematical formulas out of
thin air. Where did they come from?
Despite his status as an untrained amateur mathematician, and a college
dropout to boot, the young Srinivasa Ramanujan was producing mathematical
results that were so unexpected and so significant that they are striking to a
mathematician who sees them for the first time even today, a century later. When
I first saw them, they appeared to me as exquisite mathematical treasures, which
had been revealed to Ramanujan as if by magic, as though spirited from the
depths of some Ali Babas cave. And even at an early stage of my life as a profes-
sional mathematician, I found them utterly irresistible, and I would eventually
tie my career to them. I just had to find out how Ramanujan had obtained them.
How could he possibly know that the mathematical formulas he was conjur-
ing were correct formulas that would take some of the worlds leading math-
ematicians months and years to prove? There was something mystical,
supernatural, perhaps even spiritual in the way Ramanujan obtained his results,
and indeed, those are the sorts of adjectives that are frequently applied to him.
When asked how he obtained his results, Ramanujan would reply that his
family goddess, Namagiri, sent him visions in which mathematical formulas
would unfold before his eyes.
Brahmins were at the top of Indias caste system, and they prided themselves
on their historical role in perpetuating and maintaining the Hindu religion.
Ramanujan was a devout Hindulikely not only because he was a Brahmin, but
also through the influence of his mother, who was deeply involved with activities

67
CHAPTER 9
in the local temple to the goddess Namagiri. The Sarangapani temple was just up
the street from Ramanujans family home in Kumbakonam, and he spent much
of his time there doing his mathematics.
He once explained to a friend that he saw in the mathematical expression
2 n - 1 the primordial God and several divinities. This was because when one
plugs n = 0 into the expression, one gets 11 = 0, which represents nothingness.
Plugging in 1 for n gives the result 21 = 1, which he said represented to him
unity and the infinite God. When substituting 2 for n, one obtains 3, the Trinity,
which to him meant the Hindu gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. Plugging in 3
for n yields the number 7, which represented the Saptha Rishisthe Seven
Sages of Hinduism, described in the Vedas, sacred texts dating to as early as the
second millennium b.c.e. Ramanujan also found religious symbolism for addi-
tional values of n.
He once said to a friend, An equation for me has no meaning unless it
expresses a thought of God. In this, he came close to an almost identical state-
ment by Einstein, who in describing his work on general relativity and his
attempts to find a theory that would capture the nature of gravitation and the
physical laws of the universe, famously said, I want to know Gods thoughts.
Beginning in 1907, having lost his college scholarship and at loose ends
regarding everything in his life outside the pages of Carrs book, Ramanujan
began to keep a notebook of his mathematical results. He claimed that they came
to him in dreams and visions: Namagiri would appear to him and draw mathe-
matical statements over a red screen. In the morning, he would write them
down, ponder them, analyze them, and study them further to see how they
could be extended to new results. In fact, he would often wake up in the middle
of the night to write down a formula that had appeared to him in a dream, and
in the morning, he would write it out in greater detail.
When I first heard this story about Ramanujan and his dreams, I rejected at
once as fanciful poppycock the suggestion that his insights came to him as
visions from a goddess. I, who had been raised with no religion and a strong
belief that all phenomena have a rational explanation, viewed the idea of divine
inspiration as a fable invented by others to add mystery to the legend of
Ramanujan, or else cooked up by Ramanujan himself to elevate his accomplish-
ments beyond the mundane world of hard work, the sort of thing my father did,
scribbling all day on yellow pads of paper.
But I have gone a very long distance out of my way since then, and today, I have
quite different views.
68
Chapter 10

PURGATORY
G
enius often finds itself rejected when it fails to fit into the mold
designed for ordinary people. Einstein, for example, was at first
denied admission to the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, in Zurich, because he failed the nonscience portion of the entrance
examination. Thomas Edisons teachers told him that he was too stupid to learn
anything, and he was fired from his first two jobs for not being productive
enough. Ramanujan was in good company.
When we last saw Ramanujan, he had just flunked out of Pachaiyappas
College. He had hoped eventually to enter the University of Madras, since a
degree from that university would have qualified him as a working mathemati-
cian or given him the credentials to obtain some other respectable job with a
decent salary. But having failed the physiology part of his exams repeatedly, he
now found himself out of school and unemployed. No work meant no money,
and Ramanujan did not have even enough to feed himself. In desperation, he
returned home to Kumbakonam. But soon he was on the road again.
Returning to Madras, Ramanujan continued to live in abject poverty. He had
little to eat and was desperate to find some kind of employment. He began look-
ing for any sort of job, and he finally obtained a temporary post as a clerk, but he
left after a few weeks. He couldnt keep his mind on his work; his addiction to
mathematics was too strong. Then he decided to try to obtain a more suitable
positionone that he hoped would leave him time for mathematicsby con-
tacting men in the British administration of India, the famously efficient Indian
Civil Service, who were also mathematicians or had some knowledge and appre-
ciation of the subject. He began to build a network, contacting friends, friends of
friends, family, family friends, and anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone
who might appreciate his mathematical genius and decide that it would be a
shame for someone so talented to be without a livelihood.

69
C H A P T E R 10
Ramanujan had a pleasant personality. He was uncommonly likeable and

engaging, which made even those who had met him only briefly happy to give
him a reference. Given the name of someone who might be able to help him, he
would go and knock on his door. He also approached professors at the colleges
he had attended as well as at other colleges and universities in south India, show-
ing them his mathematical work and hoping to interest them in providing him a
post that would enable him to continue to do mathematics.
His work was so astonishingly novelbut also seriously lacking in detail and
anything resembling formal proofthat some of the professors at first doubted
that it was his own. But once he showed them how he derived his equations, a
few understood that he was not a fraud, and they wrote enthusiastic letters of
reference on his behalfbut they came to nothing.
Eventually, as his money dried up, his situation became more dire, and he had
to think seriously about nonmathematical subjects, such as where his next meal
was coming from. Desperate, he began to look for almost any form of employ-
ment. Eventually, he obtained a temporary post as clerk in the Office of the
General Accountant, in Madras, a very minor civil service position with a very
small salary. He could barely survive, and he continued looking for something
better that would allow him time to pursue mathematics without starving for it.
Finally, his networking began to pay off, and he went to meet a truly important
man, Ramachandra Rao, who held a high position as revenue collector in the
city of Nellore. And what was more, he was a mathematician, and indeed was
currently serving as secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society. In a 1920 arti-
cle in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society, Rao described his first
meeting with Ramanujan:
Several years ago, a nephew of mine perfectly innocent of mathematical

knowledge said to me, Uncle, I have a visitor who talks of mathematics;
I do not understand him; can you see if there is anything in his talk? And
in the plenitude of my mathematical wisdom, I condescended to permit
Ramanujan to walk into my presence. A short uncouth figure, stout,
unshaved, not overclean, with one conspicuous featureshining eyes
walked in with a frayed notebook under his arm. He was miserably poor.
He had run away from Kumbakonam to get leisure in Madras to pursue his
studies. He never craved for any distinction. He wanted leisure; in other
words, that simple food should be provided for him without exertion on his
part and that he should be allowed to dream on.
70
PU RG ATORY
He opened his book and began to explain some of his discoveries. I saw quite
at once that there was something out of the way; but my knowledge did not
permit me to judge whether he talked sense or nonsense. Suspending
judgment, I asked him to come over again, and he did. And then he had
gauged my ignorance and showed me some of his simpler results. These
transcended existing books and I had no doubt that he was a remarkable
man. Then, step by step, he led me to elliptic integrals and hypergeometric
series and at last his theory of divergent series not yet announced to the
world converted me. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted a
pittance to live on so that he might pursue his researches.
Rao was taken enough with the brilliance of Ramanujan that he determined
that offering him a position in Nellore would not doRamanujan belonged in
the larger Madras, where he could meet mathematicians and othersand
instead offered him a stipend that would allow him to continue his mathematical
work unhindered by worries of employment. This was a godsend. Ramanujan
settled in Madras and continued to work on his identities.
At some point, he returned home to his parents in Kumbakonam. There,
completely oblivious to what was going on around him, he would sit on the
porch, doing mathematics in total concentration, his eyes shining when he made
a discovery. His parents supported him without complaint and showed no irrita-
tion or inclination to push him to look for a job. But his mother had certain ideas
of her own about his future.
71
Chapter 11

JANAKI
W
hat Ramanujans mother had in mind was a wife for her son, and
like my parents marriage, Ramanujans was to be an arranged one.
After consulting the goddess Namagiri, Komalatammal had
decided that it was time for her son to get married. So she set out to find him a
wife. Through an Indian tradition allowing child marriages, whose consumma-
tion was deferred, Komalatammal found her son a child bride, the ten-year-old
S.Janaki Ammal.
His mother had arranged everything. She began with a visit to distant rela-
tives in Rajendram, seventy miles west of Kumbakonam, a village so small that
it does not appear on most maps. There, she noticed a sprightly girl of nine
whose family had five girls to marry off and was so poor that they could offer
little by way of a dowry. She immediately consulted the girls horoscope in con-
junction with that of her sonas was the custom in such mattersand decided
that Janaki was perfect for Ramanujan. A few months later, on July 14, 1909,
when Janaki was ten, the wedding took place in Rajendram, and at the same
ceremony, one of Janakis sisters was also married. Unfortunately, this sister
would die of a fever some months later.
After the wedding, Ramanujan returned home with his mother to
Kumbakonam, and over the next few years he would become a mathematical
nomadtraveling by train throughout south India, to Madras, and elsewhere
while Janaki stayed home with her mother, who was teaching her how to be an
obedient wife and perform household chores. The couple would not live together
until 1912, in Madras, where Komalatammal would live with them.
It was this child bride of Srinivasa Ramanujan who, seventy-five years later, as
an eighty-five-year-old widow, sent my father that fateful thank-you letter.

73
C H A P T E R 11
Janaki Ammal
74
Chapter 12

I BEG TOINTRODUCE MYSELF
T
hough he was without a college degree and had essentially no formal
training in mathematics, Ramanujan had accumulated a massive
collection of formulas, all recorded in his notebooks without proof.
Eager to share his work with others, he began to publish some of his findings,
beginning in 1911 by submitting problems to the Journal of the Indian
Mathematical Society. At first, nobody paid attention, or at least no one was able
to solve his problems. For example, one of the problems that he challenged read-
ers to solve was to find the value of
1 + 2 1 + 3 1 + .
What number was represented by this infinite nested square root?

Six months passed, and three new issues of the journal appeared, yet no one
had proposed a solution. If any readers were paying attention, they were stumped.
So Ramanujan simply revealed the answer: 3. But he did not reveal his meth-
ods, and in fact, finding the solution is difficult, requiring a long derivation.
Ramanujan had developed a formula that took a sum of three numbers and
expanded it into an infinite nested square root. The problem he posed was a
special case of that formula for the sum 2 + 1 + 0.
In 1912, Ramanujan finally obtained a more permanent position, as a clerk in
the Madras Port Trust. He performed his job so efficiently that he had time to
continue his research in mathematics and publish more papers. His brilliance
was now more widely appreciated, and Ramanujan and his supporters began to
realize that he would never receive the recognition he deserved in India, where
little cutting-edge research was being done. Most Indian mathematicians were

75
C H A P T E R 12
either pursuing mathematics as an avocation on top of another job or working

in a college or university with heavy teaching duties and little time or reward for
research. They would not have the background to understand and appreciate
Ramanujans mathematical accomplishments.
That same year, 1912, Janaki finally came to Madras to live with the man who
was formally her husband. He had a position now, and could support her, and
she was thirteen, on the cusp of adolescence. Komalatammal came from
Kumbakonam to live with the couple, further training Janaki in the occupation
of housewife. She was a constant chaperone, and when she had to be absent,
another woman would take her place in the household.
Ramanujan had obtained his post at the Port Trust through a recommenda-
tion by Ramachandra Rao, his staunch patron in Nellore. His supervisors in
Madras were the Englishman Sir Francis Spring and his subordinate, the Indian
S.Narayana Iyer. His work, which consisted in reviewing accounts of the trust,
allowed him time to pursue his mathematical research, and both his supervisors
encouraged him in that direction. For the first time in his life, Ramanujan had
satisfactory employment, was appreciated both for his performance at work and
his mathematical endeavors, and could devote time to filling his curious note-
books with a treasure of mathematical identities. But both Sir Francis and
Narayana Iyer understood that Ramanujan needed an audience for his work out-
side of India, since no Indian mathematician could fully understand and appre-
ciate his work, and as an Indian, Ramanujan would unlikely receive recognition
by the British establishment in India, which maintained a strict color bar. They
decided to appeal to mathematicians in Britain on Ramanujans behalf.
They began by writing to Micaiah John Muller Hill, Astor Professor of
Mathematics at the University of London, who had served as chancellor of the
university and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Hill wrote back courteously,
suggesting that Ramanujan be more careful with his notation and the presenta-
tion of his results, but he had clearly failed to appreciate Ramanujans genius,
which was buried in his nonstandard notation and paucity of proofs.
Disappointed, Ramanujan himself wrote to two British mathematicians,
H.F.Baker, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former president of the London
Mathematical Society, and E.W.Hobson, also a Fellow of the Royal Society and
chair of pure mathematics at Cambridge University. Both returned Ramanujans
submissions without comment.
Ramanujan did not give up. On January 16, 1913, he wrote to G.H.Hardy, the
Sadleirian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and also a Fellow
of the Royal Society. Unlike Ramanujan, who loved only mathematics, Hardy
76
I BE G TOI N T RODUC E M YSE L F
was interested in many subjects. He had almost decided to study history on

entering university; he was interested in music and art; and throughout his life,
he was fanatically devoted to the game of cricket
Hardy viewed himself as a pure mathematician and boasted that his work
had no application to the real world. (Little did he know that one of his main
interests, the theory of prime numbers, would become the basis of the encryp-
tion algorithms that have become omnipresent in the digital age.) In his 1940
essay A Mathematicians Apology, Hardy expounded his views about the impor-
tance of the purely intellectual pleasures of mathematics, stripped of any direct
application to the real world. He compared proofs of theorems to poems, works
of art, and musical compositions.
Hardy was the leading number theorist in the world at that time, and his text-
book on number theory, An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, written with
E.M.Wright, would become a classic in the field. Moreover, in 1911, Hardy had
begun a long and strikingly fruitful mathematical collaboration with his
colleague John E.Littlewood, a titan in the field of mathematical analysis. This
was a pair eminently qualified to judge Ramanujans work, and in writing to
Hardy, Ramanujan had aimed his dart well.
G. H. Hardy
77
C H A P T E R 12
Madras Port Trust Office

Accounts Department
16th January 1913
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 perannum. I am now
about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have
undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been
employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not
trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a
University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made
a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are
termed by the local mathematicians as startling.
There followed pages of formulas and assertions, all offered without a hint of
proof. Ramanujan touched on divergent series, exotic integrals, formulas involv-
ing , hypergeometric functions, prime numbers, divisor functions, sums of
squares, and continued fractions. He considered the series of positive integers,
namely 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + , and he claimed that it could be interpreted as summing
to 1/12 instead of infinity, hinting at his rediscovery of results of Bernoulli,
Euler, and Riemann. He offered remarkable-looking formulas involving and
the trigonometric functions sine and cosine. Some of his formulas were incor-
rect, but the errors could be corrected once the idea was understood. Some for-
mulas remained unproved for a long time, while others await a solution by future
mathematicians. Some of Ramanujans expressions are so abbreviated or cryptic
that mathematicians today continue to struggle over them.
Ramanujan concluded his letter with a heartfelt request:
Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like
to have my theorems published. I have not given the actual investigations
nor the expressions that I get but I have indicated the lines on which I
proceed. Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give
me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you.
I remain, Dear Sir

yours very truly
S.Ramanujan
78
Chapter 13

These Formulas Defeated
Me Completely
A
nd so it was that toward the end of January 1913, or perhaps in the first
days of February, Hardy, over breakfast in his rooms at Trinity College,
in Cambridge, received a curious letter from India containing nine
pages of Ramanujans original mathematical work.
A mathematician of Hardys rank and reputation often received letters from
amateurs who thought they had discovered something new in mathematics and
were seeking validation, perhaps publication, perhaps even renown. As an editor of
several mathematical journals, I too am accustomed to receiving manuscripts from
amateurs. Each year, I receive dozens of flawed proofs of famous problems, such as
Fermats last theorem and the Riemann hypothesis, that have stumped generations
of mathematicians. (Fermats last theorem, having resisted solution for almost four
hundred years, was finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995 using almost the entire
armamentarium of advanced twentieth-century mathematics, while the Riemann
hypothesis continues to defy the worlds greatest mathematical minds.)
Most of these invalid proof attempts fail because the amateur has made a false
assumption that if true would render the problem trivial. Its rather like getting
trapped in a fools mate in chess: you think you have mounted a powerful attack
against your opponents king, but the next thing you know, you have been check-
mated. Other proofs sent in by amateurs are correct, but they are merely redis-
coveries of long-known results.
What Hardy had before him that morning looked like real mathematics. But
that didnt mean it was necessarily the real deal. Was it fraudulent? he asked him-
self. Had this unknown Indian with the careful schoolboy handwriting that always
missed crossing his ts perhaps copied the work of a mathematician from an
obscure journal and was trying to pass it off as his own? Or was the work perhaps

79
c h a p t e r 13
genuinely his own but of no real value? Looking at the formulas more carefully,
Hardy recognized some of the results as mathematical derivations that had been
obtained by others and were well known. Others made no sense to him at all. Yet
others were so fantastic that they had to be the work of either a crank or a genius.
It would just have to wait. He put the letter aside, picked up his newspaper, and
continued with his breakfast, planning to look at it more carefully that evening.
After the mornings regimen of four hours of mathematical research came
lunch, then perhaps a game of tennis and dressing for dinner. That evening,
Hardy again studied the letter from India. He became more and more intrigued.
As he reread the pages, he realized that two results that had at first looked like
nonsense were somehow related to hypergeometric series and continued frac-
tions, which had been previously studied by Euler and Gauss.
Continued fractions are numbers that are described by an iterative process of
division. For example, we can express the fraction 7/10 as a continued fraction thus:
7 1 1 1 1
= = = = .
10 10 3 1 1
1+ 1+ 1+
7 7 7 1
2+
3 3
Such a finite continued fraction always represents a rational number. Things get
interesting when irrational numbers are developed into infinite continued frac-
tions. Let us take as an example a famous irrational number, the golden ratio,
denoted by the Greek letter phi,
1+ 5
f= ,
2
though any old square root would have done almost as well. Pythagoras, Euclid,
and Kepler, among many other distinguished scientists through the ages, have
been fascinated by this number. It is called golden because as a proportion, it is
pleasing to the eye and has been used extensively in works of art. It also appears
in nature, in such diverse places as the arrangement of leaves and branches of
plants, the geometry of crystals, and the structure of DNA.
The golden ratio also appears in many of mankinds most beautiful creations.
Some great works of architecture and art, such as the Parthenon, the pyramids of
Giza, and the Mona Lisa, make use of the pleasing proportions of the golden
ratio. Salvador Dal, the famous twentieth-century Spanish surrealist, explicitly
referenced the golden ratio in his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper,
which depicts Jesus and his disciples seated below a dodecahedron, a geometric
figure whose proportions define the golden ratio.
80
T h e se For m u l a s De f e at e d M e C om pl e t e ly
Salvador Dals The Sacrament of the Last Supper (courtesy of the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.)
As a purely mathematical object, the golden ratio has many faces. It is, for
example, the limit of the ratios of successive terms of the famous Fibonacci
sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, (each term is the sum of the previ-
ous two terms), namely the ratios 1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5, 13/8, 21/13, 34/21,
55/34, 89/55,. The golden ratio was described by Euclid around 300b.c.e. by
extreme and mean ratios, which leads to the relationship
1
1+ = f , or f 2 - f - 1 = 0,
f
whose positive solution is
1+ 5
f= .
2
Despite these elegant descriptions, the infinite decimal expansion
f = 1.618033988749894848204586834365
exhibits no apparent pattern. However, with some mathematical sleight of hand,

a beautiful pattern can be made to emerge. Using repeatedly the relation
81
c h a p t e r 13
1
1+ = f,
f
we can develop into an infinite continued fraction:
1 1 1 1
f= = = = ,
1+f 1 1 1
1+ 1+ 1+
1+f 1 1
1+ 1+
1+f 1
1+
1+
and so on adinfinitum. In his first letter to Hardy, Ramanujan indicated that he

had found a theory that generalizes this well-known classical fact about the
golden ratio. He claimed that he knew how to evaluate a much more general
continued fraction, one containing a variable quantity that in theory can repre-
sent infinitely many continued fractions at once. Such continued fractions were
well known to mathematicians, having been discovered in 1896 by the British
mathematician Leonard Rogers. Thanks to the variable, the RogersRamanujan
continued fraction, as it is known today, generalizes the golden ratio, which is
the special case in which the variable assumes the value 1.
Ramanujan offered two examples, with the variable equal to -e -p and e -2p ,
where e=2.718281 is Eulers number. He claimed that the two resulting con-
tinued fractions are in fact equal to simple expressions involving the golden
ratio. Immediately following these two formulas in the letter, Ramanujan
dropped a bombshell. He made the astonishing claim that he had a general
method for computing these continued fractions explicitly for a large class of
values of the variable. If that were true, then Ramanujan possessed a theory
unlike anything anyone had seen before.
Hardy was amazed. Of all the values to choose from, why did Ramanujan
choose the numbers -e -p and e -2p ? How did he then figure out their corre-
sponding continued fractions? Hardy didnt have a clue, prompting him later to
remark,
They defeated me completely, I had never seen anything in the least like this
before A single look at them is enough to show they could only be written
down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because no
one would have the imagination to invent them.
82
T h e se For m u l a s De f e at e d M e C om pl e t e ly
Hardy was not alone in his admiration. These identities have fascinated scores
of mathematicians, serving as the topic of hundreds of research papers over the
past century. The problem of discovering their source, a general theory that
explains them as part of an infinite framework of identities, would become one
of my main goals as a mathematician.
Was this a startling new result or a bunch of nonsense? Hardy decided that he
had better show the letter to his colleague Littlewood. Littlewood concurred that
this curious letter seemed to contain some quite amazing results. The two math-
ematicians pored over the theorems and formulas in the letter for some time.
They were captivated. They met a few more times, trying to make sense of the
theorems and series, much of it written in nonstandard notation.
As the days passed, and Hardy and Littlewood, and others to whom Hardy
showed the letter, analyzed its contents, Hardy came to the conclusion that they
were in the presence of something most unusual. First of all, the letter contained
some mathematical results that he and Littlewood had seen beforealbeit writ-
ten in what seemed like a different language, because of the notationbut which,
they decided, Ramanujan had likely not seen elsewhere. He had apparently
rediscovered published results that had seen little circulation.
Other results were completely new, and they were able to prove some of them,
though it took considerable effort. Some assertions were incorrect, but such mis-
takes were rare, and even the erroneous results were clever, obtained through an
interesting mathematical process. It appeared that Ramanujan had developed
his own unique methods.
It was clear that Ramanujan had discovered mathematical gems beyond the
imagination, and Hardy was not going to let those treasures go to waste. But
first, he wanted to see how Ramanujan had justified his results, for Hardy was a
strong advocate of mathematical rigor. On February 8, he wrote to Ramanujan
expressing his interest, but asking him kindly to supply proofs of his
statements:
I was exceedingly interested by your letter and by the theorems You will
however understand that before I can judge properly of the value of what
you have done, it is essential that I should see proofs of some of your
assertions.
83
Chapter 14

PERMISSION FROMTHEGODDESS
R
amanujan was elated finally to receive a positive response from
England, and he promptly replied to Hardy: I have found a friend in
you, who views my labours sympathetically. But instead of proofs of
the sometimes audacious statements he was making about infinite series, con-
tinued fractions, and integrals, Ramanujan sent Hardy more theorems. Hardy
received these with disbelief. How could one young man, in a country so distant
from the world centers of mathematics, come up with so many ingenious math-
ematical results? It was a mystery. But he persisted in requesting proofs. And
Ramanujan persisted in not supplying theminstead sending even more results.
Hardy began to develop a suspicion. Perhaps the Indian was worried that the
English mathematicianwhom he knew not at allwould steal his work and
publish it as his own. And so Hardy wrote again, explaining that Ramanujan
now possessed letters from him, whichif Hardy tried to pass his work off as his
owncould be used to incriminate him in a clear case of academic theft. Perhaps
this suspicion about a suspicion caused a cooling off of the epistolary relation-
ship that had developed between them. For a while, there were no more letters.
Hardy had to find out where these claims and formulasmarvelous, mysteri-
ous, beguilingcame from. Were they true, these mathematical treasures? And
if so, why were they true? And how had this stranger on the other side of the
world obtained them? Ramanujan would have to come to Cambridge.
One of Hardys youngest colleagues at Trinity was Eric H.Neville, a man two
years younger than Ramanujan. Neville was on his way to India for a research
and lecturing project in his area of differential geometry. Hardy asked to speak
with him before he embarked for India. Would he be willing, while in India, to
travel to Madras, and through academic connections there, try to meet this mys-
terious young man, a certain Ramanujan? Then, Hardy suggested, if the meeting
was satisfactory, he should be convinced to travel to England.

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C H A P T E R 14
Neville arrived in India, and after some time made it to Madras, where he
met Ramanujan. The two menperhaps because they were so close in agegot
on very well. In fact, they would become lifelong friends. While in Madras,
Neville began gently to coax the reluctant Ramanujan to go to England, where
his gifts could be further developed, where he would be appreciated as a math-
ematician, and where he could work more freely without worrying about a live-
lihood. Neville reported to Hardy about his modest progress in convincing
Ramanujan to think about coming to Cambridge, and Hardy then wrote an
official letter of invitation.
Hardy also interceded on Ramanujans behalf to convince the Indian authori-
ties to support such a move. He described Ramanujans exceptional abilities in
letters to Indian officials at the University of Madras, whose help he needed to
secure funding to match what he could garner in England, so that Ramanujans
travel and stay in Cambridge could become a reality. The word spread like wild-
fire throughout the academic community of south India: a professor of the high-
est rank in Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society, believed so strongly in
Ramanujan that he wanted to bring him to England.
Ramanujan had no such interest. He wrote to Hardy, What I want at this
stage is for eminent professors like you to recognize that there is some worth in
me. And now he clearly had obtained the recognition he so badly cravedand
everyone in Madras knew it.
Soon, other offers came his way, offers that were much closer to home.
Everyone wanted him, everyone hoped that he would stay in his native India and
help make it great in mathematics. On April 12, 1913, Ramanujan was granted a
generous scholarship as a research student at Presidency College, in Madras.
There were no obligations, just that he should pursue his researches in any way
he wanted, that he should do the mathematics that he loved with absolutely no
other responsibilities. This was truly a dream come true. Hardys interest in his
work had finally won him not only recognition, but the financial independence
that would allow him to do mathematics and would grant him also the possibil-
ity of receivingfinally, after twice failing to do soan academic degree that
could secure his future. Ramanujan was on top of the world. He had no reason
to go anywhere.
When all of the arrangements for his fellowship at Presidency College had
been made, he was joined by his mother and his wife, and they found a pleasant
apartment near the college. This was perhaps the happiest period in his life. He
was with his loving mother and wife, and he was free to pursue his research. He
was now famous all over south India as the amazing genius whom even the great
professors in England admired.
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PE R M IS SION F ROMT H EG ODDE S S
But Neville continued to nudge him toward Cambridge, at Hardys urging. It

soon appeared, however, that the ocean was an insurmountable obstacle.
Brahmins live by very strict laws that govern everything they do in their lives.
Ramanujan was a strict vegetarian, and more than that, he could accept food
only if made by a trustworthy fellow Brahmin. In addition, there was a prohibi-
tion against Brahmins crossing the ocean. They could travel within Indiabut
not over the sea to England. Many, of course, did go. Britain has had a consider-
able number of Indian students in its universities, many of them Brahmins, but
those who went did so by breaking the rule against travel by sea.
And now, finally, Ramanujan was soaring. His renown increased as he created
ever more new mathematical formulas and theorems. He was respected and
admired by everyone. What more could he have asked for? Yet one day, Neville
came to him and they talked about mathematics, and about England, and to his
surprise, he found that Ramanujan was not absolutely averse to accepting
Hardys invitation. He understood that in Cambridge, among prominent math-
ematicians, he would thrive. He would be able to aspire to loftier goals, to do
better mathematics, than was possible in the relative isolation of Madras.
The minor problems were soon resolved: Ramanujan was prepared to break
the religious prohibition against travelpromising that he would adhere
strictly to his dietary rules even across the seas. But he would not leave India
without his mothers blessing. But the mother objected, and the problem was
the goddess.
Komalatammal maintained that the goddess Namagiri had told her that she
was against her sons leaving India. Ramanujan tried to convince his mother that
she had no way of knowing the goddesss wishes, but his mother knew better.
After a few more months of wrangling, Komalatammal suggested to her son that
perhaps he should try to obtain Namagiris permission on his own.
And so it was that in December 1913, Ramanujan, accompanied by two
friends, set out for the city of Namakkal, eighty miles west of Kumbakonam.
Their destination was a rocky promontory on which an important ancient tem-
ple dedicated to the goddess Namagiri was perched. After a trek up to the tem-
ple, they set up camp on its floor and meditated. Ramanujan and his friends
remained at the temple for three days and three nights, and on the third night,
Ramanujan had a dream in which Namagiri spoke to him and granted him per-
mission to leave India for England.
According to another version of this story, while Ramanujan did in fact make
the pilgrimage to Namakkal, it was his mother who obtained Namagiris permis-
sion for her son to leave India. In this telling, Komalatammal had a dream in
which Namagiri told her to allow her son to leave. Dream or no dream, wishful
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C H A P T E R 14
thinking or chicanery, Namagiri seemed to be on board, and Ramanujan was

free to pursue his destiny.
On March 17, 1914, Ramanujan set out for England aboard the SS Nevasa, of
the British India Lines. Janaki had asked her husband to take her with him, but
he refused her request, saying that she would be a distraction from his work.
Now he was standing on deck, clearly with mixed feelingsexcited to go where
leading mathematicians could help him advance his mathematical career, but
worried about being alone in a strange, cold country. England was indeed cold
compared to south India, where it is always warm, even hot, and practically
never even cool. And he was also worried about maintaining his strictly vegetar-
ian diet.
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Chapter 15

TOGETHER AT LAST
T
he Nevasa made it to the mouth of the Thames almost exactly a month
after leaving Madras. Ramanujan disembarked and was taken to
London, where he stayed for several days at a center that welcomed
Indian students on their arrival in England. Neville arrived home in England
around this time, and Ramanujan spent his first few months in Cambridge living
with Neville and his wife in their house near Trinity College.
Trinity College Courtyard at Cambridge University
Soon would come the test whether Ramanujan had made the right choice in
coming to England. Having worked in isolation his entire life, he welcomed the
chance to have a mentor and friend who understood the beauty that he saw in
mathematics. And he now had the hope of receiving validation for his years of
lonely labor from the top men in English mathematics.

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C H A P T E R 15
One can only imagine the first meeting between Ramanujan and Hardy. Not
long after their first conversations, Hardy declared, He possesses powers as
remarkable in their way as those of any living mathematician. His work is of a
different category.
Eventually, Ramanujan was assigned rooms at Trinity, very close to Hardys
own rooms. The two men metalmost every day for several years, poring over
Ramanujans amazing formulas. Hardy had already received more than one hun-
dred formulas in letters from Ramanujan, and Ramanujan had brought many
more with him. Looking at his claims, Hardy could see that many of them were
remarkable innovative breakthroughs in mathematics. How could this man have
produced them entirely on his own? That was an enigma that Hardy, even with
Ramanujan by his side, could not resolve. What does one do with an answer like,
Namagiri, our goddess, presented them to me in my dreams? Mathematicians
would be contemplating the mystery for the next century.
At one point, Hardy described Ramanujans amazing achievement by saying
that in India, he had been working under an impossible handicap, a poor and
solitary Hindu pitting his brain against the accumulated wisdom of Europe. I
find this image both deeply moving and highly descriptive of the life of this tow-
ering mathematical figure, a unique genius.
In working with Ramanujan, Hardy saw two immediate aims he must try to
achieve. First, he wanted to establish complete and rigorous proofs of as many of
Ramanujans claims as possible. The two of them worked together, proving many
of the results, and those derivations were subsequently published by the two of
them in academic journals. Other results would take many years to proveby
them or by other mathematicians, including my colleagues and myself. A small
fraction of the claims turned out to be false. But in those cases, the results still
presented interesting methods that could be used to crack other difficult prob-
lems and that shed important light on mathematics itself and how it is pursued.
Hardys second aim was to bring Ramanujan up to speed on modern mathe-
matics. Ramanujan had done all his previous work without the benefit of an
advanced mathematical education, like what was available at Cambridge. He
thus encouraged Ramanujan to sit in on classes and lectures. That effort was not
an unqualified success, because by then, Ramanujan was set in his ways. He had
done mathematics according to his own methods and was reluctant to change
them. But he did learn how to construct rigorous proofs of theorems.
90
Chapter 16

CULTURE SHOCK
L
ike my father, who came to America in the late 1950s, Ramanujan had
accepted the invitation of a leading mathematician to work in a foreign
land. Both men struggled to fit into an alien culture with different
languages and customs. In a way, Ramanujan and my father were both fugitives.
My father fled the desperate conditions of postwar Japan, and Ramanujan fled a
life in which he was intellectually hampered. I believe that my parents responded
to the effects of racial prejudice, and in particular anti-Japanese sentiment, by
enforcing kaikin, isolationism, in our home in Lutherville. Ramanujan, as a
foreigner in England, was similarly isolated, separated from virtually everyone
apart from Hardy and a few friends. If it were not for their shared absorption in
mathematics, I think that both men, Ramanujan and my father, would have had
an even more difficult time of it.
Ramanujan would work for hours at a time. Often, he would start late at night,
when the world was quiet, and work until dawn. He would then cook breakfast
for himself, then sleep much of the day, seeing very little sunshineboth because
Britain is notoriously gray and because he largely kept to his rooms. The only
other place he frequented was Hardys rooms, where they would work together.
Unlike Hardy and other Fellows of Trinity College who regularly played sports,
such as tennis and cricket, Ramanujans life was completely sedentary.
He was having a difficult time adjusting to life in England. The customs were
completely different from what he was used to. The English were formal and
coldunlike the smiling, warm south Indians, ever interested in how you felt
and what you were up to. He hated having to give up his long hair for a European
cut. The collar of his stiffly starched shirts hurt his neck, and his feet never got
used to the pressure of Western shoes. He longed for his carefree life in sunny
India, wearing Indian dress, eating the spicy and vibrant food of his childhood,
feet unbound.

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C H A P T E R 16
And since as a Brahmin he could not trust the cooking at the Hall at Trinity,
where everyone else ate, he was forced to buy his own foodstuffs and cook for
himself in his rooms. This had the effect of depriving him of the important social
contact that took place in the dining halls of the college, for much of the social
interaction among faculty, fellows, students, and others at Trinity took place in
the dining halls. Ramanujan was mostly alone.
He worked at night, cooked early in the morning, went shopping for food
later in the day, slept, saw Hardy for an hour or two, ate dinner, and worked
again. It was an unhealthy life, with few breaks or rewardsother than the
mathematics. He had a small gas stove in an alcove in his rooms, and there he
would cook his vegetables. He missed the delicious raitas and spicy rice dishes of
south India. Here he had to make do with what he could find.
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Chapter 17

TRIUMPH OVER RACISM
L
ike my father, Ramanujan dealt with racial prejudice. Japanese-Americans
like my parents suffered the effects of racism in America largely because of
World War II.Ramanujan suffered as a dark-skinned Indian living under
British imperialism. Both men were able to overcome prejudice through their
important mathematical contributions.
Ramanujan at Cambridge (Ramanujan center and Hardy standing at far right)

93
C H A P T E R 17
Ramanujans theorems stunned the British mathematical world. Nothing like

his magical legerdemain had ever been seen. There was no question but that he
was realizing the potential that Hardy had recognized in his letters.
In March 1916, Ramanujan was awarded a bachelors degree from Trinity
College for his contributions to mathematics made during his time at Cambridge.
The doctoral degree was not commonly given for mathematics during that
period, and later, when mathematics PhDs began to be awarded, his degree
would be upgraded to a doctorate.
Hardy felt strongly that Ramanujan deserved to be elected a Fellow of Trinity
College, as he himself had been. So he began to lobby with the other fellows to
have Ramanujan thus honored. But he was surprised by the strong resistance
that he encountered. He should not have been. To begin with, the relationship
between Britain and India was that of colonial power over a conquered people.
Part of what makes it possible for one people to colonize another is a belief in the
colonizers superiority. In this case, that sense of superiority had a strong racial
element: Take up the white mans burden is the notorious refrain of a poem
published by Rudyard Kipling in 1899.
As overlords of a subjected people of an inferior race, the English rulers of
India consciously isolated themselves from the masses they ruled. They lived
apart from them; they didnt socialize with them; they worked with them only to
the extent necessary. Even the most refined and educated Brahmin could not
socialize as an equal with the lowliest British civil servant stationed in India.
Indian students came to Britain in modest numbers, and they were formally
welcomed there. But nobody embraced them, just as my father was welcomed to
the United States in the 1950s but was not considered a true member of American
society.
When Ramanujans name was proposed for election as a Fellow of Trinity
College, one of the English fellows responded that he would not have a black
man as fellow. This defeat depressed Ramanujan greatly: he could be the most
gifted mathematician around, but he would be seen in this land as a black man,
unworthy of recognition.
When my father first told me about Ramanujan thirty years ago, he made it a
point to stress the injustice that Ramanujan experienced as an Indian in England.
That bigotry evoked powerful images of my parents lives as Japanese-Americans
living in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and of course, to a lesser
extent, it reminded me of the bigotry that I had encountered in my own life.
Another reason why Hardy failed in his attempt to have Ramanujan elected a
Fellow of Trinity College had to do with World War I.The Great War erupted
in 1914, and Cambridge almost emptied of students as they joined the effort to
94
T R I U M PH OV E R R AC ISM
defeat the Germans. Many professors, including Littlewood, also headed to the
battlefields of France and Belgium. Hardy remained, as did Ramanujan.
Hardy was opposed to war, even while he understood the necessity to defend
Britain and the Continent from German aggression. Although he was not a con-
scientious objector, he voiced his opposition to how such objectors were being
treated. Then at some point during the war, he supported antiwar statements
made by the eminent Cambridge logician Bertrand Russell, and that was enough
to tar him with the pacifist brush. He was thus politically weakened and could
not effectively fight for Ramanujan.
Ramanujan, humiliated and upset by the defeat of his nomination to become
a fellow, also suffered physically. It was at this point that the wartime scarcity of
fresh fruits and vegetablesthe main staples of his vegetarian dietbegan to
affect his health adversely. He became desperately ill. Naturally heavy, he now
lost weight. He talked less, even meeting his only main contact with the world,
Hardy, less frequently. One day, in London, he threw himself in front of an
oncoming subway car. Miraculously, an operator saw him fall to the tracks just
in time to throw the electric switch, cutting power to the trains and thus saving
Ramanujans life.
Despite such adversity, Ramanujan continued to do mathematicsbut his
health continually declined. He now required frequent hospitalizations, and
Hardy began to fear for his life. Hardy then decided that he would try another
way to get Ramanujan the recognition he deserved, and so he put him up for
election to the Royal Society. If Trinity rejected him, Hardy reasoned, the more
hallowed Royal Society might take him. The Royal Society heard the case for
Ramanujan, and also consideredsomething Hardy brought to their atten-
tionthat his health was declining and that if he were not elected that year, there
might be no future opportunity to recognize his achievements. And so in 1918,
Ramanujan became a Fellow of the Royal Society, the second Indian to be
awarded this high recognition, and one of the youngest fellows ever. Ramanujan
was vindicated.
Ramanujan was also elected to the London Mathematical Society. After
that, the Fellows of Trinity College found it hard to say no the second time his
name came up, and in October 1918, he was finally elected a Fellow of Trinity
College. He had triumphed against prejudice and won the honors he so well
deserved.
95
Chapter 18

ENGLISH MALAISE
E
nglands unforgiving climate and Ramanujans poor diet took their toll.
Ramanujans health continued its long decline. He had endured a vari-
ety of ailments throughout his life, and after five years in Cambridge,
he was constantly ill. The doctors believed he had tuberculosis, although later
findings have suggested a parasitic infection affecting his liver. Blood poisoning
was also suspected. No one knew exactly what was amiss, but he suffered from
fevers, stomach pains, and many other symptoms.
The treatment for tuberculosis was rigorous. Patients were purposely kept in
unheated airy rooms, with only blankets to protect them from the elements. The
idea was that the lungs could somehow be cleansed through fresh, cold air. In
England, he had always suffered from the cold, and now he was to be exposed to
cold on purpose. And foodalways a concernnow seemed an insurmount-
able problem, since the institutional food was incompatible with Ramanujans
pledge of maintaining a strict Hindu diet that had to be prepared under Brahmin
oversight (namely his own). Ramanujan therefore insisted on doing his own
cooking, and after his Indian friends who visited him lobbied the management
of the sanatorium on his behalf, he was allowed to prepare his own meals.
Theories abound as to why he became so sick. Tuberculosis can be aggra-
vated, even triggered, by a lack of vitamin D.In England, Ramanujan was always
indoors and was therefore exposed to little sunshine, and his dietmostly fruits
and vegetablesdid not supply much of that needed vitamin. The privations
brought about by the war made things even worse. Moreover, his sedentary noc-
turnal life was in itself unhealthy. His condition, whatever was causing it, had
become acute. He lost weight rapidly. He was in and out of hospital. Finally, even
Hardy came to realize that to save his life, perhaps his protg should return
home to India, at least for a while.

97
Chapter 19

HOMECOMING
I
n hospitals, sanatoriums, halfway houses, through declining health,
Ramanujan kept up his work. He continued to produce groundbreaking
theorems about partitions, identities, infinite series, integrals, and more,
though nowin contrast to his work five years earlierwith a proof of every
result. He had learned how to do mathematics in the modern style, in which every
assertion must be demonstrated using rigorous argumentation.
Ramanujans health was declining slowly, and that allowed for a host of useless
statements to be made about his condition: he is better today, or only slightly
worse, or he is on the mend. At some point, Hardy felt that he was doing well
enough for a sea voyage, and he suggested both to him and to the academic
authorities in Madras, which had cosponsored his sojourn in England, that per-
haps it was time for Ramanujan to return homeat least for a visit in hopes of
further improving his health.
And the time was propitious. During the war, the German navy had blockaded
all the sea routes to Britain in an effort to isolate it both from the Continent and
from American aid, which came mostly by sea. With the war now over, sea travel
was returning to normal, and it was again a matter of course to book passage to
India. But Ramanujan did not express any great enthusiasm for the idea of a sea
voyage home. In fact, he was rather cool to the proposal, which Hardy found
perplexing. There were several possible reasons for Ramanujans reluctance.
By now, the young Brahmin had become used to living in England. He had
found a way to maintain his diet: buying fresh vegetables wherever he could,
cooking themeven in a hospital kitchenand procuring what he couldnt pur-
chase from Indian friends in England who may have received packages of food
from relatives back home and were willing to share them.
Another reason was that he had heard that if as a tuberculosis patient, he was
being encouraged to go home, it was a sign that his disease had worsened beyond

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C H A P T E R 19
hope of cure, and he was being sent home to die among his loved ones. There
was also a personal reason for his reluctance. He was alone, sick, depressed, and
worried that for more than a year, he had not heard a word from Janaki. And for
some months, he had heard little from his mother or father. Finally, there was a
mathematical reason for his reluctance. Ramanujan was worried that in India,
his torrent of mathematical productivity might recede.
For all these reasons, he was in no rush to go home. But it seems that he had
little choice in the matter. Hardy was out to save his life and was in contact with
Indian colleagues; that arrangements would be made for Ramanujans return to
his homelandnominally for a visit, now made possible by the end of the war
was a foregone conclusion.
In February 1919, Ramanujan obtained a new passport. The passport photo for
which he sat has since become one of the best-known photographs of him. He had
all the necessary documents, and passage home had already been booked for him.
Ramanujans passport photo
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HOM E C OM I NG
On March 13, 1919, Ramanujan paid his last visit to Hardy, left him many of
his mathematical papers, and boarded the SS Nagoya, bound for Bombay. From
there, he would make his way by train to Madras and Kumbakonam.
On April 6, Ramanujan was united with his family in Madras. He was show-
ing symptoms of severe ill health, and he was placed under the care of a physi-
cian in a quiet house in the city. Everyone wanted to see him. There were
numerous articles about him and his life in the newspapershe was a celebrity.
But he needed peace and quiet if he was to regain his health. It was ordered that
the number of people he saw every day be limited and that he be given ample
food and rest.
As summer approached, the doctors told Komalatammal that she should take
her son to the high country, where it would be cooler and drier than in swelter-
ing coastal Madras. She chose a town in the hills west of Kumbakonam, not far
from the hometown that the family had never forsaken while moving around
over south India. Money was no longer a problem, for Ramanujan received
funding for all his activities, living expenses, and health care from a number of
government agencies and other sources. He was one of the most famous people
in India, and the biggest problem, other than his health, was to keep people away
from himit seemed that everyone on the subcontinent wanted to see the cel-
ebrated genius who had returned home.
Ramanujan spent the summer in a relatively cool environment, working on
mathematics. It is hard to describe his health: there were ups and downs, but he
was still treated as a tuberculosis patient. His wife would wash his legs and feet,
clean the phlegm he would cough upa sign of tuberculosis, although consis-
tent with other possible ailmentsand feed him the foods he had craved for five
long years in England: yogurt, rice, pickles, and spicy curries and dal.
Late in the fall, Ramanujan and his entourage moved back to Madras, now
that temperatures had dropped to more tolerable levels. By now, he had stopped
cooperating with his doctors. He had become an exceptionally willful and feisty
patient, frustrating all who tried to take care of him. It is unclear whether he had
lost faith in his physicians or simply wanted to be left alone after being shuttled
between hospitals and sanatoriums, first in England and now in India. Or per-
haps he was now at peace with whatever fate would bring him.
On January 12, 1920, from Madras, Ramanujan wrote his last letter to Hardy.
This was the letter that, eighty-five years later, would shape much of my research
program. It was his first letter to Hardy in almost a year. Ramanujan began, I am
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C H A P T E R 19
extremely sorry for not writing you a single letter up to now. And then he
dropped yet another of his mathematical bombshells. He had discovered a new
type of function, which he called mock theta functions. Its actual meaning
how Ramanujan would have defined it precisely had he had more space and
timeis still debated among experts almost a century later.
102
Chapter 20

THE TRAGIC END
A
s Ramanujan approached the end of his life, he was surrounded by
domestic strife. His wife and mother were constantly arguing with each
other over even the most trivial matters. Anything would send one of
them, usually the mother, into a tirade against the other. But Janaki was now twenty
years old and no longer a child. She had her husband at her side, who would often
support her against the unreasonableness of his mother. Ramanujans maternal
grandmother had also joined the household, and she would frequently add her two
cents to the domestic arguments. It was not an environment conducive to healing.
Ramanujan would often tell his doctor that he had lost the will to live. There
were too many factors wearing him down: his illness, the constant domestic
strife, and the self-imposed drive to work on mathematics, especially the new
mock theta functions. He was slowly withering away.
Early in the morning of April 26, 1920, he fell into a coma, in which he
remained for two hours while Janaki tried to revive him by feeding him milk.
He died toward midday.
All of India mourned its national hero, Ramanujan, a man who had brought
so much honor and pride to a nation still in the chains of colonial rule. He had
triumphed against all odds, he had made a name for himself in England and
throughout the world, and he had left a mathematical legacy that would keep me
and other mathematicians hard at work over many decades, trying to under-
stand and generalize his results.
After Ramanujans death, his notebooks and other papers were widely dis-
persed. George Andrews discovered Ramanujans so-called lost notebook, for-
gotten in the Trinity College library, when he visited there in 1976. He spent
many years studying it, as did I and other mathematicians. Others of Ramanujans
papers are still being studied, and it will be many years before we understand all

103
CHAPTER 20
that he knew and worked on. Sifting through Ramanujans work continually
turns up nuggets of mathematical gold. The work continues.
Janaki Ammal lived another seventy-four years, until her death in 1994. She
adopted two boys, brothers whose parents, who lived very close to Janaki, had
died within a two-year period. One of them, W.Narayanan, became a banker,
and he remained very close to his adopted mother all of their lives, taking care
of her in her old age. Late in life, she would also enjoy financial help from the
Indian governmentsomething that had not been forthcoming in the years fol-
lowing her husbands death.
It seems that Ramanujans mother had taken some of her sons papers and sold
them to universities and institutions and that Janaki had received nothing. For
many years, she received only a very modest income from her husbands pension.
All the rest had gone to his parents. Those who could attempted to exploit
Ramanujans fame for their own benefit. For example, Ramanujans brother
wrote to Hardy asking for money to support his education. It is unfortunate that
so little went to Janaki.
Janaki asked very little for herself. In her old age, she simply wanted the bro-
ken promise of a statue in Ramanujans honor fulfilled. Where others had failed,
the mathematicians of the world came through, and I am proud that my father
was one of the many who helped provide the gift of a bust of Ramanujan. Janakis
touching letter to my father thanking him for his contribution will always remind
me of her love for her husband.
104
Part III
My Life Adrift
Chapter 21

I BELIEVE INSANTA
Montreal (19841985)
M
y parents dropped me off at Baltimores Penn Station, and I was
now standing alone on the platform waiting for the Amtrak train to
NewYork, where I would change for the Adirondack to Montreal.
I had my backpack, my Peugeot bicycle, and my large suitcase. My parents were
on their way home, and there was no turning back. Like Ramanujan, who ran
away to Vizagapatnam after he flunked out of college, I was running away having
dropped out of high school. Of course, we had different reasons for running.
Ashamed of having lost his scholarship, Ramanujan had simply disappeared. I
was fleeing my pressure cooker of a life, but I had left with my parents knowl-
edge and consent.
It takes over fourteen hours to travel by rail from Baltimore to Montreal, and
I passed the time contemplating my past and my future. The metronomic rum-
ble of the wheels as they clicked and clacked over the steel tracks somehow
nourished my deflated ego. Go forth, go forth, go forth, they seemed to say.
Have hope, have hope, have hope. I told myself that I was setting out to live a
life that was true to myself, that I was the master of my destiny, and soon my
somber mood was replaced by optimism and excitement. I thought about my
friends, and I wondered whether I would ever see any of them again. By the
time the train pulled into NewYork, I was thinking about what it would be like
to live in a French-speaking city. Would the radio stations play the songs I knew?
What would it be like to ride the metro? Whom might I meet? Would I make
friends? I had no idea what the future might bring, and I was oddly excited by
that uncertainty.
Now, Montreal was not a random choice of destination, and there was one
certainty that comforted me: my brother Santa would be waiting for me on the

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platform in Montreal. Santa had somehow managed to escape the formula that
my parents had laid out for him. Perhaps because they had such relatively low
expectations of him, he had been granted greater scope in finding his own way.
After earning his bachelors degree in biology from the University of Chicago,
Santa immediately began to work toward a doctorate in biochemistry and
immunology in Montreal, at McGill University. My parents had mapped out for
him a career in industry or business, and so we were all surprised when he
decided to pursue a career in academia. As it turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly
to those readers with more liberal ideas of childrearing, Santa at twenty had a
better idea of his strengths and interests than his parents had had for him when
he was six. Santa would go on to hold faculty positions at Harvard, Johns
Hopkins, University College London, and Emory University, and he is now the
president of the University of Cincinnati.
Five years apart in age, we had never really been close, and so I was touched
by his offer to look after me, and I was looking forward to living with him. But it
turned out that Santa had other plans. To my surprise, he had arranged a room
for me at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, on Rue Stanley, in downtown Montreal.
I was totally unprepared for so much independence. As the sixteen-year-old son
of tiger parents, I had experienced only a very narrow swath of life outside of
home and school. I had little or no practical skills or street smarts. I was also
unprepared for looking after myself. I had never even had my hair cut by anyone
other than my mother.
But I moved in, stowed my bike, put away my things, made my bed, and man-
aged to get through the first night without becoming completely unnerved. But
the next morning, when I opened the door of the common bathroom, I was
confronted with the sight of an unbelievably hairy young mans back. He was
enormous. Wearing nothing but a Budweiser bath towel wrapped around his
capacious waist, he was holding a Walkman in his left hand while brushing his
teeth with his right. His head was bobbing to the beat of whatever was blasting
from his headphones. Sensing that he was no longer aloneperhaps he saw me
in the mirrorhe turned in a flash, revealing a pair of gold aviator sunglasses. At
the sight of me, he yelled, I suppose in order to be heard over whatever music
was pounding into his head, Kid! Cool, man! Give me five! He turned out to be
a football player on McGill Universitys club team. Nice guy, I suppose, but he
scared the hell out of me.
I lived in the frat house for a few days, cowering in my room, wondering what
sort of Animal House I had gotten myself into.
Santa responded with good grace to my terror by offering me the sofa in his
one-bedroom apartment. Santa, of course, knew all about my insecurities, and all
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about the voices in my head that continually spoke to me of my inadequacy. We

had, after all, grown up in the same tiger cage, and he understood me completely.
He told me that he heard the same voices. For the first time in my life, I felt that I
had someone in whom I could confide, someone who understood my inner tur-
moil and could offer the loving and nurturing care that I so sorely needed.
Although we had not been close before, a strong fraternal bond formed
between Santa and me during my stay with him in Montreal. Through him, I
encountered much of the outside world that had been forbidden to us in
Lutherville. He taught me how to lead an independent life, and he supported my
adventurous spirit. He took me for my first professional haircut. He taught me
how to use the metro and how to navigate a large and bustling city safely on my
own. He encouraged me to join Team West Island, a local cycling club. I partici-
pated in a few races with them, most notably the Gran Prix Lachine, in which we
raced around the lovely Parc Lasalle, with a hyperenthusiastic announcer who
referred to me as le jeune Amricain. We played softball for his departments
intramural team. We went to the cinema, where we saw the Michael J.Fox film
Back to the Future. How I enjoyed not having to write an essay about it! We ate
late-night souvlaki at a restaurant called Kojax. I went with Santa and some
friends from his lab to my first rock concert, where we saw Corey Hart perform
his huge hit Sunglasses at Night at the Montreal Forum.
I have many fond memories of the time I spent in Montreal, and I am certain
that I would not be where I am today had I not run away from my former life to live
with my brother. It was thanks to Ramanujan that my parents had let me go, but it
was Santa who set me on my feet and helped to point me in the right direction.
Santa had arranged a part-time job for me working in his lab, which gave me
an important degree of stability. But I was primarily interested in exercising my
newfound freedom as a teenager living away from home for the first time.
Sneaking into Thomson House, a limestone mansion on the McGill campus
where graduate students gathered for drinks after work, was my favorite pas-
time. We hung out in its stately rooms, and it was there that I developed a taste
for Canadian beer: a bottle of Molson Golden or Labatt Blue can still evoke
happy memories of my time in Montreal.
During my time in Montreal I was transformed. I developed a relationship
with my brother Santa that was closer than any I had ever experienced. He
helped me to find my self-confidence, and he taught he how to put fun into my
life. He prepared me for life outside our kaikin home in Lutherville, for life in the
real world.
Eight months after my father received the letter from Ramanujans widow, I
was ready to apply to college. I sent applications to Johns Hopkins, MIT,
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C H A P T E R 21
Princeton, and the University of Chicago. Getting into college was much easier
in the 1980s than it is today, and I was armed with strong SAT scores (700 verbal
and 800 math) and a recommendation from Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian
Stanley, the man who had devoted his career to studying gifted and talented
youth. Despite my status as a high-school dropout, I was accepted by Johns
Hopkins and the University of Chicago. Given a choice, there was no way I was
going to go to Hopkins. It was much too close to home. So I accepted the offer
from the University of Chicago, Santas alma mater. The summer passed pleas-
antly and uneventfully, and in September, my parents drove up to Montreal, and
we headed west for Chicago.
Santas wedding day in 1989 (left to right: Santa, Wendy Yip-Ono, Takasan, my mother,
Momoro, Ken)
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Chapter 22

COLLEGE BOY
Chicago (19851988)
I
arrived at the University of Chicago in September 1985. Its campus, con-
structed largely in the collegiate Gothic style, occupies a two-hundred-
acre site on Chicagos south side. The northern and southern parts of the
campus are separated by the Midway Plaisance, a broad mile-long park that was
constructed in 1893 for the Columbian Exposition. Whether by chance or
design, I was assigned to Santas former residence, BurtonJudson Courts, just
south of the Midway. I had a room in a first-floor corner suite in DoddMead
House, one of the six houses that constitute BurtonJudson. The neo-Gothic
architecture, the leaded windows, the view across the Midway to Harper Library,
all enhanced my already overbrimming confidence in my success as a college
freshman. Several of the older students remembered Santa, and I was delighted
to learn that my hero astrophysicist Carl Sagan had lived in the same dormitory
in the 1950s, a few doors from my own suite.
The University of Chicago has a long history of admitting students like me.
Each year, in fact, Julian Stanley would recommend a handful of high-school
dropouts to the university. This year, he had also recommended two brothers
from a Chicago suburb, aged ten and eleven. At seventeen, I was clearly not
going to be viewed as an underage student. The younger brother was a mere
pipsqueak of a kid who wore a Pac-Man watch and was so small that his feet
dangled well above the floor as he sat in class, swinging his feet wildly like any
other restless fourth-grader.
Founded in 1890, the university has risen into the ranks of the worlds top
universities. It claims eighty-nine Nobel laureates among its faculty and alumni,
more than any other institution of higher learning in the world. Many of the
worlds leading thinkers have been on the UChicago faculty, including T.S.Eliot,

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Enrico Fermi, Hardys friend Bertrand Russell, to name just a few. I felt myself
part of a glorious tradition, and I was ready to sally forth and add my name to
the colleges roll of honor. At the very least, I was going to study hard, do well,
and not screw up.
My plan, if you could glorify my act of desperation with such an epithet, had
worked. I had escaped from high school, and I was somehow given the chance to
start life anew, at a first-rate university, with great expectations. It didnt matter
to me that I was a dropout, or that I would have to repeat a grade for failing all
my high-school courses if for some reason I had to return to Lutherville.
My parents were worried about me, as they always were, and they were justified in
their concern. After all, I had disappointed them in one way after another. But I prom-
ised them that I would take college seriously. I even promised to quit bicycle racing. In
fact, I left all of my bikes behind. I assured them I would study hard and earn good
grades. I felt that I was ready, and I began college with high hopes. I wanted to prove to
my parents that by living my life my way, not by their formula, I could succeed.
Alas, I had built my house upon the sand. I had no idea that it would be a
mighty struggle to transition from the carefree life I had enjoyed in Montreal to
the hardcore labors of a University of Chicago undergraduate. Actually, I didnt
struggle. I didnt really transition at all. Instead, I reveled in my freedom, and I
made the most of new social opportunities and the great city of Chicago. I was
no longer one of the few Asian-American kids at school; there were many of us
in my freshman class. I was making new friends, and I was focused almost
entirely on enjoying every moment of my new life.
Many first-year college students have difficulty adjusting to their sudden free-
dom from parental supervision, but I suspect that the children of tiger parents are
at an even greater risk of crashing and burning. You would think my year in
Montreal would have eased the transition, but I guess I had a lot more pent up in
me that was waiting to burst out. I lived recklessly, and today, as a professor at
Emory University, I witness the same sort of behavior among each new crop of
first-year students. College life offers all sorts of forbidden fruit, and many kids
overindulge, as though there were a biological imperative to make up for lost time.
And boy, did I make up for lost time! I was a total goofball. I went to lots of
parties. I lived for Harolds fried chicken, a super-tasty, cholesterol-laden delight
smothered in hot sauce and barbeque sauce, which was prepared in enormous
deep fryers behind a thick wall of bulletproof glass. I was a regular at Medusas,
an underground dance club near Wrigley Field that was popular among under-
age college students.
My predetermined path was mathematics, so I of course rejected it, deciding
to take premed courses instead. Two months into the quarter, I took my first
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C OL L E GE BOY
exam in honors chemistry. I received a C+. I suppose the A and B students were
studying more and partying less. Staring at the exam as I walked back to Burton
Judson in the dark, I was in a state of shock. I had never received such a poor
grade on an exam before. In fact, I dont think I had ever received a grade as low
as an A. I had the urge to run, at once, and as far away as possible. But I couldnt
run anywhere. The campus was enclosed by dangerous neighborhoods on three
sides and Lake Michigan on the fourth. That mediocre grade deflated my self-
confidence. I was no longer enjoying college life.
Then I got an F on my first paper in my common core course in sociology. The
professor, a distinguished economist, began his lengthy comments, written in
damning red ink, with the words, It is obvious to me that you do not understand
much of Marx at all. High-school classes had been a breeze. UChicago classes
were putting up a strong headwind. My professors were respected leaders in
their fields, and they all had high expectations. The voices in my head were ready
to chime in with their condemnation: Ken-chan, you no good. You not study
hard enough. Out of those voices I was finally able to compose a simple syllo-
gism: if you dont want to be a failure, Ken-chan, you had better apply yourself.
Like Ramanujan, I struggled with college, although both of us had the intel-
lectual ability to earn good grades. Each of us, however, suffered from an addic-
tion. Ramanujan was addicted to mathematics and was achieving important
results, while I was addicted to goofing off and having a good time and was not
achieving much of anything.
Although I knew that if I applied myself to my courses, I could do well, I did
my best, immature lad that I was, to avoid having to come to terms with anything
whatsoever. Instead of working harder, I simply abandoned premed, switching
my major to mathematics. I was not happy about returning to my predestined
path, but I figured I could get by much more easily in math than in the other
majors offered at UChicago, despite the fact that I was behind the other math
majors in coursework, including the two prodigious brothers. Most UChicago
math majors entered college having taken at least one year of calculus. I, on the
other hand, having dropped out of high school, had never taken any calculus at
all. Of course, I would have taken calculus in high school had I not dropped out,
so I didnt feel quite like a dummy. But I knew that I had some catching up to do.
My speculation turned out to be correct. I was able to earn respectable grades
in my math courses without exerting much effort, and that was important,
because at the time, effort was not my strong suit. I had a knack for learning
proofs, and that was enough to get by.
I took courses from distinguished mathematicians such as Israel Herstein and
Raghavan Narasimhan. I did reasonably well in their classes, but I was not a star
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student. I wasnt even an excellent student. It was as though I was seeking medi-
ocrity. I didnt want to compete and be recognized as someone exceptional.
Instead, I sat in the back row of my math classes seeking anonymity. I didnt want
to return to my high-school role as the nerdy Asian-American kid.
In the spring quarter, I took Math 175, Introduction to Number Theory, from
Professor Herstein. The two prodigious brothers were also in that popular class,
and they sat next to each other in the front of the classroom while I skulked in
the back row. I had enrolled in the course because I had heard about the legend-
ary Israel Herstein years earlier from my father. Unfortunately, it turned out that
Herstein was seriously ill with cancer. Although he hid the fact of his illness, he
was not himself, and he probably should not have been teaching the class.
He would shuffle back and forth behind the lectern, taking drags of a cigarette
between sentences. He wrote almost nothing on the board. Instead, he would
lecture by bombarding us with questions in an angry tone. He was so intimidat-
ing that almost no one ever answered. There was certainly no way that I was
going to volunteer, even when I knew the answer, for fear of resurrecting my old
image as an Asian-American math nerd. In class after class, he bombarded us
with his hostile questioning, and we sat, silent. Out of frustration, he would
throw chalk at us, even saying one day that he could teach this stuff to mon-
keys. Although I did fairly well in his class, my negative experience blinded me
to any possible beauty in number theory. I would continue to do mathematics,
but there was no way that I was going to like it. My plan was to earn decent
grades while putting forth minimal effort. My goal was to get by in my courses
while leaving enough time for my first priority, my social life.
Although, as promised, I wasnt racing my freshman year, I began doing some
cycling. Having left my Peugeot in Lutherville, I had to obtain a bike, and I
lucked out. A friend in BurtonJudson lent me a decent Peugeot, which he let
me keep in my room. I went for long rides on the Chicago lakefront. On one of
those rides, I met Tom Kauffman, a fifty-five-year-old security guard at the
Illinois Institute of Technology who was one of the areas top racers in his age
group. He often invited me to join him on his rides, teaching me the circuitous
routes that offered safe passage through the tough neighborhoods of Chicagos
south side. Tom, who was a high-school dropout like me, had been a cook in the
U.S.Navy. He became one of my confidants, a father figure who nurtured me
outside of my college life. I rode a good deal, both with and without Tom, and I
was soon back in good form.
And it came to pass that I got through my first year at UChicago, if not with
flying colors, at least not with my tail between my legs. I spent the summer back
in Montreal, working in my brothers laboratory cleaning test tubes.
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C OL L E GE BOY
On returning to Chicago in the fall, I soon realized how much I missed bike
racing. So after a year of keeping my no-racing pledge, I went off the wagon,
without telling my parents. It wasnt long before I was invited to race for the
South Chicago Wheelmen, a local club sponsored by Schwinn Bicycles and the
Chicago Dough Company, a local Italian restaurant. I was passionate about
cycling, but I had no idea that I would one day be just as passionate about
mathematics.
Tom and I had become quite close, spending hours traveling, odd couple that
we were, to races all over the country. He would race in his age group, while I was
learning the ins and outs of competing in the senior eighteen to thirty-four con-
tingent. Tom won almost every race he entered, while I struggled to perform in
races that were much longer and faster than those to which I had been accus-
tomed in the fifteen-to-seventeen age group. Thanks to Toms patience and men-
torship, I advanced through the ranks and became an accomplished cyclist. I
knew Tom for only a few years before his life was tragically cut short when he
was killed at work, the victim of a stray bullet. I still grieve over my loss, and I am
thankful for the time we spent together. Tom taught me that you didnt need an
advanced degree to live a happy and fulfilled life.
My first pedal stroke of the

1987 Mid-America Time
Trial Championships
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Cycling helped me in unexpected ways. The exercise, of course, was good for
my health. If I was going to have a sound mind, it needed to be housed in a
sound body. But the most important benefit was the strength of character I built
from the regimen of long daily training rides in unforgiving conditions, including
dodging cars in Chicago traffic and negotiating unfriendly neighborhoods, a
daily real-life version of the classic Disney film Mr. Toads Wild Ride. My wild
wintry rides were often miserable, thanks to ice, snow, and the piercing bone-
chilling winds off Lake Michigan. I have painful memories of frostbitten cheeks
and numb fingers and toes on those early-morning rides to Sauk Village, Illinois,
twenty-five miles to the south. The return trips were mighty struggles against
freezing headwinds in a desperate race to get back in time for my morning
classes, a race that I often lost.
That fall, I joined the Psi Upsilon fraternity, a fun-loving crazy group of guys
who lived in an old house across from Bartlett Gymnasium on University
Avenue. The house had been around since 1917 and had acquired a permanent
odor of stale beer and Pine-Sol, and its creaky stairs did little to conceal its age.
Psi Upsilon fraternity house (photo by Doug Jackman and Chuck Werner)
116
C OL L E GE BOY
I was proud to be a brother, to be part of a lineage that included Supreme Court

Justice John Paul Stevens and football star Jay Berwanger, the first to be awarded
the Heisman trophy. To think that only a year before, at the beginning of my
time in Montreal, I had been terrified of living in an Animal House, and now I
was a card-carrying member of an Animal House and loving it.
I never told my parents that I had joined Psi U.It was one more thing that I
hid from them, just as I had hidden my seventh-grade math tests. I had no desire
to subject myself ever again to their withering criticism. As a brother at Psi U, I
became a respectable foosball player. I also became a DJ, following in the foot-
steps of my friends Joe Spike Melendres and Harold Hoda Tsai. We spun
twelve-inch singles at campus dance parties. New Orders Bizarre Love Triangle
and Dead or Alives Brand New Lover were my favorites.
Preparing to deejay a Psi U Halloween party (left to right: Spike in costume, Ken Ono) (photo by Joe
Melendres)
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Chapter 23

ERIKA
I
had moved out of BurtonJudson at the end of my freshman year and was
now living in Shoreland Hall, a building dating from the 1920s, when it
opened as the luxury Shoreland Hotel, a place where Al Capone held
business meetings and Jimmy Hoffa kept a room. Another famous resident
was the economist Milton Friedman. But nothing lasts forever (except eternity),
and by the 1970s, the Shoreland had come down in the world considerably.
Needing another dormitory, the university bought the hotel and converted it
into a residence hall. That incarnation lasted until 2009, when it was sold to a
private developer and renovated into luxury apartments. I had a room on the
sixth floor with a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan.
One of the resident heads in Shoreland had a cherubic, bubbly three-year-old
daughter named Kelsey. Whenever Kelsey and her mom ate dinner with us in
the cafeteria, Kelsey was the center of attention. We all loved her, and there
wasnt enough of her to go around. But Kelsey had a favorite, a freshman girl
from Montana with green eyes and wavy blond hair. Whenever Erika was
around, you were likely as not to find Kelsey in her lap.
Many of my earliest memories of Erika Anderson, who in 1990 would become
Erika Ono, are related, if a bit tangentially, to cycling. I would breakfast at Pierce
Dining Hall on Saturday mornings before almost anyone else was awake. I
wanted to get an early start to my long training rides into northern Indiana.
Erika, who was a freshman in 1986, had drawn the morning shift at Pierce as
part of her workstudy job. Despite the early hour, she always had a smile on her
face, a smile that I looked forward to seeing week after week. She made me deli-
cious omelets, and she smuggled bunches of bananas to sustain me on my long
rides. She has been sustaining and nurturing me ever since.

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Erika, the love of my life, is a gift from Missoula, Montana. Missoula is a geo-
logical oddity; it is located at the convergence of five mountain ranges and the
confluence of three rivers, and as its topography suggests, it is a place rich in
natural beauty, some of which, as I think I have suggested, had recently migrated
to Chicago. Lewis and Clark were the first European explorers to visit the area,
and it is the setting of the classic autobiographical novel A River Runs Through It,
a tale of two brothers coming of age during the Great Depression and the
Prohibition era.
Unlike my family, in which the focus had always been on intellectual achieve-
ment, Erikas family emphasized spiritual and physical communion with nature.
Missoula was the perfect place for their active lives. Erikas father, Robin, who
taught high-school biology for thirty-five years, is an all-around athlete and out-
doorsman. He is a fly fisherman, Nordic skier, runner, and windsurfer. Erikas
mother, Jan, who was an elementary-school librarian, was a national-class
downhill skier in high school. She played soccer and ice hockey into her sixties.
Erika emerged from their parenting as the adventurous, fun, maternal, thought-
ful, and warm person that has blessed me throughout my adult life.
With Erika at the 1987 Psi Upsilon Valentines Day formal
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ERIKA
And it is not only I who have been blessed by Erikas presence. Although she
studied French literature at the University of Chicago, it was there that she dis-
covered her true passion: babies and their mothers. She would later earn a sec-
ond undergraduate degree in nursing, and then a masters degree in nurse
midwifery from the University of Pennsylvania. She loves helping women dis-
cover their strengths as they become mothers. She has welcomed hundreds of
babies into the world, two of them ours.
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Chapter 24

THE PIRATE PROFESSOR
Chicago (19881989)
U
Chicagos Department of Mathematics is located in Eckhart Hall, a
distinguished neo-Gothic building on the main quadrangle across
the street from Alpha Delta Phi, a rival fraternity. Many famous
mathematicians have taught in this building, including Andr Weil, the man
who discovered my father in 1955in Tokyo. The departments history and the
imposing nature of the building intimidated me from day one.
Despite my desire for anonymity, it was soon apparent that a math major
named Ono had nowhere to hide. It was well known among the math faculty
that I was the son of the famous Takashi Ono at Johns Hopkins. Professor Walter
Baily, a senior number theorist and family friend, showed great kindness to me
by inviting me to his home for dinner my freshman year. He welcomed me to
UChicago, and as a family friend, he wanted me to know that he was always
available in case I ever needed anything. Here was a chance for a friend and
mentor in my major field. But stubborn fool that I was, I never spoke with him
again. I didnt want to be known as Onos son, and I was too insecure to feel that
I deserved the goodwill of such an eminent mathematician. My failure to accept
his friendship and mentorship haunts me to this day. Even long after I finally
grew up and figured out who I was, I never took the opportunity to reconnect
with him. And now it is too late. Professor Baily passed away in 2013.
My inability to remain anonymous was disconcerting. Not only was I expected
to be a star simply on account of my name, I felt that if I fell short, my failure
would not be mine alone; I would be disappointing and embarrassing my father.

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I had put half a continent between myself and my parents, yet despite the dis-
tance that separated us, I still heard voices that hammered at my self-esteem:
Ken-chan, you no can hide. Your professors know family, so it your duty to
live up to name of Ono. You must be one of best, and right now you losing
out to ten-year-old kid with Pac-Man watch.
I didnt care enough to apply myself to my coursework. I was having too much
fun spinning records at Psi U and grinding the gears of my bicycle in races all
over the midwest. I stubbornly rebelled against my parental voices. I wasnt
going to let them tell me what to do. Its not as though I was still the goofball
screw-up of my freshman year. I was taking difficult math classes, and I was
earning acceptable grades. To my frat brothers and cycling friends, I was some
kind of math god merely based on the names of the courses I took, which
included Differentiable Manifolds, Algebraic Topology, and Number Theory.
I wasnt a brilliant math major, but I was doing well among a cohort of strong
students. It didnt seem fair that the voices in my head continued to speak relent-
lessly to me about my inadequacy.
But I had finally to admit that in some sense, perverted though it may perhaps
have been, there was some truth to what those voices were saying. The best math
majors at UChicago were extremely talented, and many first-rate majors maxi-
mized a less-than-extreme talent through hard work. Without talent and a
strong work ethic, you were not going to be a star student at UChicago. In this
regard, if I entertained thoughts of being among the best at UChicago, then it
was true that I was inadequate. I was talented, but I was no genius. You can be a
talented composer and work hard at your craft, and then along comes a ten-
year-old Mozart and leaves you in the dust. You can be a talented number theo-
rist and labor over theta-function identities, and then along comes a Ramanujan,
and you realize that there are minds that pull this stuff out of a dimension to
which you will never have access. To be sure, I could have done much better than
I was doing, but I wasnt willing to put up with the late nights of problem sets.
I wanted to enjoy my social life in Psi U, and I wanted to race my bike on week-
ends. And furthermore, if I gave my studies my all and still came up short, my
voices would triumph over me. For now, I could tell them, Of course I am inad-
equate, but thats because Im not really trying.
I didnt know how to work hard enough to make the most of my talent, and
I didnt have the will to find out how. It would take many years before I would be
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T H E PI R AT E PROF E S S OR
able to come back that short distance correctly. So I told the voices to go to hell.
I rejected any desire to earn the praise and approval of my parents. I had decided
that their goals for me would not be mine. But without their goals, I had no long-
term goals at all. I was just marking time.
Then a shocking incident occurred at the end of my junior year. My instructor
in complex analysis, who was a junior visiting professor, summoned me to his
office on the second floor of Eckhart Hall. The course requirements included
three midterms and a final exam. I had earned a high A on the first midterm and
a low A on the second one. On the third exam, I think I earned a B, a sign that I
hadnt compensated for the increasing difficulty of the subject by increased
effort. But I had plenty of points from the earlier exams. In fact, I had an A-minus
average, so why was I being summoned? What did this instructor want?
I had never been to his office, and so I was surprised by the sight of his stark,
barren room when I found it. Apart from a few books and some papers, the
office was nearly empty, and it was covered in years of dust. There were almost
no personal belongings. Here was someone who apparently lived entirely in his
mind. All he needed was a desk and chair.
He told me that he knew my father and that he felt compelled to tell me that
from what he had seen of my work, I was unlikely to be successful as a profes-
sional mathematician. If that was what I was aiming toward, then I was wasting
my time chasing a hopeless dream. He encouraged me to pursue some other
career, one that didnt involve proving abstract mathematical theorems. He had
concluded that I didnt have the talent to make it as a theoretical mathematician.
But that was not to say that I had no gift for working with numbers. Perhaps I
should consider a career in finance or banking.
I was stunned. I couldnt believe what I was hearing. Here was a real live per-
son confirming the voices in my head. Everything that he was saying added up
to one simple sentence: Ken-chan, you no good. I was so angry that it took all
my self-possession to keep from shouting at him. He must have assumed that I
was working hard in his class, giving it my all, when in fact, I was putting in
hardly any effort. How dare he tell me that I wasnt up to snuff !
Although I laughed the incident off with friends a few hours later over beers at
the frat house, I was still burning with rage. I knew that I had no intention of
becoming a mathematician, but who was this interloper to tell me that I didnt
have it in me to become one if I so chose? On the other hand, it was true that I was
performing at a level below my ability. If that professor had known how little
effort I was putting into his class, he would have been right to question my matu-
rity and work ethic. But where did he get off questioning my ability, when I hadnt
even begun to show what I could do if I tried? The way I saw it, that professor had
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come to regard me as the struggling son of a famous mathematician who didnt

have a prayer of living up to his fathers expectations.
I wasnt going to take that without hitting back! Although my first reaction
was one of anger, what followed was a mixture of pride and defiance. No random
professor was going to tell me what I was or wasnt capable of doing. It was one
thing to rebel against my parents and the voices in my head, but this stranger had
put my back up. I am sure that he thought he was offering me sound advice. But
I was going to show him! I vowed that I would make some serious changes in my
senior year and turn things around. I still held out little hope that I would ever
drown out the negative voices in my head, and I didnt believe that I could ever
earn the approval and respect of my father, but nevertheless, I would set a lesser
goal and show those professors that I could work hard and be a strong student,
one worthy of their respect.
I spent the following summer racing my Italian Basso bike and interning for
a Chicago actuarial firm. While watching TV one evening in my room at Psi U,
I encountered the BBC documentary Ramanujan: Letters from an Indian Clerk.
It was four years since I had thought about Ramanujan, and hearing his uplifting
story again gave me hope. And this time, the story was on screen, in color, and I
was mesmerized by the footage of Cambridge, England, and villages in south
India. I was fascinated by interviews with the distinguished scientists George
Andrews, of Penn State, who would later become my colleague; Bla Bollobs, of
Cambridge University; and the Nobel-laureate physicist Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar, of UChicago.
Thanks to Ramanujan, my parents had allowed me to run away from my for-
mer life. Four years later, as a rising college senior, uplifted by the documentary
on Ramanujan and goaded by the realization that I had only three quarters of
college left, I vowed to give my coursework my full attention. I was no longer
ashamed of being an Asian-American math nerd and the son of tiger parents,
one of whom was a famous mathematician. Thinking again about Ramanujan
helped me appreciate my knack for numbers. I decided to embrace my identity
as an Asian-American tiger cub with some talent for math, and I prepared to
apply myself in my courses my senior year. I would prove to the UChicago math
faculty that I had real ability, that I should be taken seriously. I would worry later
about what I would do with the rest of my life.
I moved out of Psi U, and I didnt go to many parties my senior year. I devoted
myself to mathematics, Erika, and bike racing. I was invited to race for the Pepsi-
Miyata cycling team, one of the best teams in the midwest. We raced on state-of-
the-art Miyata bikes, and our skinsuits made us look more like giant cans of
Pepsi Cola than super-skinny cyclists. My main traveling partner was Ron
126
Lynch, who would later be a groomsman at my wedding. We crisscrossed the

midwest in his Subaru, traveling to races with U2s Joshua Tree blaring on the
stereo. The 1989 season, my last as a competitive cyclist, would end for me on
Fathers Day in Philadelphia at a place called Manayunk, where I got the chance
to race three-time Tour de France champion Greg Lemond in person in the Core
States Cycling Championship. It was an awesome experience.
Racing up the Manayunk

Wall in 1989 (photo by Dave
Mathis)
I enrolled in challenging math courses my senior year, and I made it a point

to stand out. I sat in the front row. I did all the homework. I spoke up often in
class. I still wasnt passionate about the mathematics, but I enjoyed the newfound
attention from my professors. I took one particularly challenging class from
Professor Paul Sally, who was known as the Pirate Professor because of his
towering figure, colorful personality, and eye patch.
Sally suffered from adult-onset diabetes, and his body slowly betrayed him
over the twenty-five years that I knew him. He died unexpectedly on December
20, 2013. By the time I was a student in his analysis class in 1988, he had lost the
use of his left eye, whence the eye patch. Later, he would lose the use of his legs,
first one, then the other, being finally left wheelchair-bound as a double amputee.
In the last years of his life, he was almost blind. Despite all of his health problems,
he was a dominant figure with a booming voice at UChicago. He had a take-no-
prisoners approach to undergraduate mentoring. He sensed that there was some-
thing in me that needed nurturing, and he was there to help me find my way.
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CHAPTER 24
Pirate Professor Paul Sally (photo by Sharat Ganapati)
Shortly after Halloween, he called me into his office, which was actually a spa-
cious suite of rooms on the second floor of Eckhart Hall. Nature apparently
abhors a vacuum more in some places than in others, and this was one of them.
Almost every square inch of Professor Sallys suite was covered in mountain
ranges of books and escarpments of papers stacked high on the floor, on desks,
on tables, in a geological formation that must have taken him decades to create.
There was just room for a fridge in the corner and access to a super-dusty chalk-
board covered with formulas and Sallys weekly schedule.
It was just the spot for a heart-to-heart conversation. Sally told me that I was
one of the best students in his class, which also included some UChicago gradu-
ate students, and so he wanted to chat about my future. He did this with many of
the math majors at UChicago. Sally was a world-class mentor, serving for decades
as the departments director of undergraduate studies.
I told him that I didnt have much fondness for mathematics, and I began to
relax when he didnt reproach me. He said that whether I liked math or not, I
appeared to have a talent for it. He mentioned my uneven performance in
UChicagos math classes, of which he had firsthand knowledge, and he told me
that he respected the fact that I was an avid bike racer. He must have known
about that from a few articles about my cycling in the Chicago Maroon, the cam-
pus paper. Then, to my surprise, he told me that we had a lot in common. His
first passion, he said, hadnt been mathematics; it was basketball. He had been a
star player for Boston College High School in the 1950s. He, too, had pursued a
128
number of interests during his undergraduate years, and had been unsure about
a future in mathematics. However, at some point, something sparked his desire
to pursue mathematics, and he somehow found his way, his journey eventually
taking him to a professorship at UChicago. He mentioned that for a brief stretch,
he had worked as a Boston taxicab driver. His story helped me understand that
one doesnt have to follow a predetermined path to achieve something in life,
that one can find ones way without knowing it at the outset. It gave me hope that
I, too, could find my way.
From then on, I went to see Professor Sally in his office three or four times each
week. I would show up at his office hours even when I didnt have any questions.
I was simply drawn to the man, the most interesting and caring professor I had at
Chicago. Every time I showed up at his office, his Boston accent would boom,
Hey man, give it there! with a large fist extended in my direction. We had a
special relationship, which continued until his death in 2013. I miss him deeply.
He suggested that I give graduate school a try. After all, he said, the math-
ematics one learns in college barely resembles the stuff that research mathemati-
cians do. It might surprise you, and you might really like the stuff. Sallys
confidence in me somehow gave me confidence in myself. He made phone calls
on my behalf, and on the strength of his belief in my ability, he single-handedly
got me into some of the top doctoral programs in mathematics. I accepted an
offer to attend UCLA on scholarship. It would be a fresh start, in a much more
forgiving climate.
It wasnt just the climate. There was Erika. We had been virtually inseparable
for two years, and we knew that we would spend the rest of our lives together.
She would need a second bachelors degree toward becoming a nurse midwife,
and UCLA had a strong nursing program. Erika had one more year at Chicago
to complete her degree, and we wistfully agreed that spending a year apart was
in our long-term interest.
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Chapter 25

GROWING PAINS
Los Angeles (19891991)
R
amanujans story had offered me hope in 1984, when I was a depressed
tenth-grader, that I could find my own path in life, and so I dropped
out of high school and left home. My path was still crooked and uncer-
tain, but on it, I had found emotional and intellectual support, first from my
brother Santa in Montreal, and then in Chicago from college friends, fraternity
brothers, my cycling mentor Tom Kauffman, and professors such as Paul Sally.
Then in 1988, just as I was nearing the end of a half-hearted math major at
Chicago, Ramanujan helped me a second time. The television documentary
about his life reinvigorated my feeling of hope, and it inspired me to work hard
my senior year. The documentary had caught me off guard, and it knocked some
sense into me. I focused on mathematics my senior year and impressed Professor
Sally enough that he helped get me into UCLA.
Of course, I was no Ramanujan. I wasnt a genius, and whereas he, as his
mothers little lord, grew up perhaps being told he could do no wrong, I as a
child could do no right. But in spite of everything, I had earned a bachelors
degree from a first-rate college and had been accepted into a major graduate
program in mathematics with a fellowship. And I was loved by the woman I
loved. If she saw something in me, I couldnt be completely worthless, could I?
Yet I was plagued with doubt. It was clear to me that I was nothing but an
impostor. As the son of a famous math professor, I could see that for success, you

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had to work really hard, spending all day, every day, scribbling on yellow pads.
I didnt have a prayer. I didnt have the necessary talent, and I didnt have the
necessary devotion. The voices in my head confirmed the hopelessness of my case:
Ken-chan, your record at Chicago not earn you place at UCLA.

You pull wool over Sallys eyes and he think you good enough to be real
mathematician. UCLA foolish to believe him. You not good enough.
You going to fail.
But voices or no voices, qualified or not, UCLA had offered me a teaching

assistantship and a scholarship, and I had accepted and was on my way. I sup-
pose I held out hope that I could turn things around in grad school. In any case,
I could try. I had to do something, and this was the one open door. And who
knows? I might somehow fulfill my dream of obtaining parental approval. In the
end, I went to UCLA because I had nowhere else to go.
I arrived in Westwood Village in Los Angeles in August 1989, and I moved
into a studio apartment with fellow UCLA math graduate student and UChicago
alumnus Brad Wilson. Our apartment was three blocks from Pauley Pavilion,
the famous basketball stadium where John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood,
won ten NCAA basketball championships coaching UCLA with players like Lew
Alcindor, who would later be known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton.
Westwood is sandwiched between Beverly Hills, home to Hollywood celebrities,
and idyllic Santa Monica, home to its well-known namesake pier and beach.
UCLA, a world-class university, seemed strangely out of place in this southern
California paradise. I knew that I was in trouble the moment I stepped out of the
cab in front of our apartment. How in the world was I going to earn a doctorate
in this warm, sunny place covered with palm trees?
Despite our choice location, our apartment was a dump. We shared a gloomy
room with a bathroom and a closet of a kitchenette. The rent was an astounding
$628 per month, an enormous price for such a rathole. I would be spending over
half my stipend of $7500 just on rent. And the exorbitant rents in our building
were clearly not being invested in maintenance. The pipes in the ceiling above
our bathroom leaked, and once a pipe burst, making me the unfortunate recipi-
ent of an unexpected cold shower.
I spent the weeks before the start of classes enjoying my new environment. I went
for long bike rides on the Pacific Coast Highway, which offered stunning views of
cliffs, miles of beaches, and famous places like Venice Beach and Malibu. I went
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GROW I NG PA I N S
mountain biking in Will Rogers State Park, familiar to me as the set for the classic TV
show M*A*S*H. I enjoyed eating out for almost every meal at places like Fatburger,
Hurry Curry, In-N-Out, and the Reel Inn. Los Angeles had so much to offer, and I
wanted to experience it all. I probably should have been thinking about the PhD
program, but there were too many distractions to which I simply had to yield.
I expected graduate school to be challenging, much harder than college. This
was, after all, full-time professional training. No more general education, frater-
nities, and extracurricular activities. But as to how challenging, I didnt have a
clue. My ignorance didnt last long. At orientation, Professor S.Y. Cheng, the
director of the graduate mathematics program, welcomed us with an ominous
warning. He predicted that one-third of us would drop out or flunk out within
two years. If we were an exceptionally good group, then half of us would finish a
PhD.Looking around the room, I queerly felt like a foreigner among my class-
mates. It seemed as though half of the new PhD students were Asian. But they
werent Asian-American like me; they were Asian-Asian, imports from China
and Japan, where they had earned their undergraduate degrees. Many of them
could barely speak English. But it clearly wasnt those students that Professor
Cheng was worried about. He seemed to be speaking primarily to the home-
grown students like me, and he sounded just like a tiger parent.
Along with most of my fellow first-year classmates, I enrolled in graduate
courses in abstract algebra, real and complex analysis, and geometry and topol-
ogy. We were expected to pass four qualifying exams within two years, and most
of us would take exams on those topics. As a UChicago graduate, I was confident
that I was adequately prepared. Alas, I couldnt have been more wrong. We at
once plunged into these subjects at a much deeper level than what the introduc-
tory courses I had taken in college had prepared me for. To my surprise, the
Asian graduate students seemed somehow to master the material with ease,
despite their poor grasp of English.
I was in trouble, and I quickly lost confidence. My voices, in that familiar slow,
accented drawl, spoke to me often:
Ken-chan, of course classes hard, too hard for you. What you expect? You
dont belong here. All that time you spend on bike, these students prepare for
graduate school. You not good enough to be mathematician.
I didnt realize that I wasnt alone. I soon found out that many of my domestic
classmates were struggling as well. Some of them decided to pool their intellec-
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tual resources and form study groups, while I stupidly struggled almost entirely
on my own. I also didnt realize that many of the foreign students had already
earned graduate degrees abroad before coming to UCLA. They had seen this
stuff already. It was not a level playing field.
I was alone with my anxieties, and Erika was far away. She was in her last year
of college, enjoying a semester abroad studying French literature in Paris, living
next to the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens. I wrote her dozens of letters in which
I complained about my predicament. I told her that I was a fraud, an impostor,
that I had somehow fooled Professor Sally into thinking that I had talent and
potential, the right stuff to become a mathematician, that I was in grad school by
a fluke, that I was in way over my head and sinking fast.
In the spring of 1990, after only one semester at UCLA, I began to plot another
escape. I was afraid of the qualifying exams. Many students flunked those exams.
And for those who passed, what were their prospects? Everyone knew that
almost all the recent PhDs were struggling to get jobs. The most I had to hope for
was in a few years time to be one of those stressed-out students about to defend
their dissertations while waiting to hear about their hundred-plus job applica-
tions, knowing full well that many of them wouldnt receive any offers. If the best
graduate students at UCLA, those who actually finished a thesis, were having
trouble getting jobs, then what chance did I have?
But that was all in the distant future. Right now, I was petrified of the exams,
and writing a thesis wasnt even on my radar. Anyhow, it seemed like a mission
impossible, like climbing Mount Everest without the aid of bottled oxygen, a feat
reserved for those with superhuman abilities. My father had taught me that
every thesis requires a solution to an unsolved problem, a question that others
had failed to crack. How in the world was I, a mere mortal, going to do that?
I finally managed to convince myself that I didnt need to run away just yet. I would
take the qualifying exams, and in the likely event that I failed them, I would then
leave UCLA with a consolation prize, a masters degree. It wouldnt be a trium-
phant outcome, but not a total failure either, though my parents would probably
think so.
To prepare for the abstract algebra and analysis qualifying exams, I studied
two to three hours every day for months. I pored over old exams, memorizing
the problems and their solutions. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Abstract
algebra was my area of interest, and so it was critical for me to pass that exam,
for otherwise, I would be mercilessly exposed as the fraud I was afraid I was.
I took both exams, and boy, was I nervous! I found them to be quite difficult,
but then they were supposed to be challenging, and we all understood that a
score of sixty percent would be a passing grade. I was not able to solve all the
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GROW I NG PA I N S
problems, but I was confident that I had scored enough points to pass them
both. Several weeks of slow-drip torture passed before we learned our fate.
Time slowed to a crawl, and then it slowed some more. I was reminded of my
days as a preschooler, when my mother would take me with her to the local art
museum, where I waited, waited, waited while she painstakingly copied one of
the paintings.
All of us who had taken the qualifiers were waiting for our scores, which we
knew would come by way of a letter placed in our departmental mailbox. I did
not exactly camp out in front of my mailbox, but for several weeks, whenever I
was at the department, I would check the mailboxes every hour. I felt as though
my entire future were riding on whether my score would be below sixty percent
or above. The day and hour finally arrived when two envelopes appeared in my
mailbox. This wasnt like college acceptance letters, with a thick letter for
acceptance and a thin one for rejection. If I wanted to know whether I had passed
or failed, I was going to have to open the envelopes.
The first letter I opened was for the analysis exam. I had passed! What a relief!
The sun was shining, all was right with the world. It was going to be a great day,
the day I overcame two important hurdles on my way to a PhD.I had been more
nervous about the analysis than the algebra, so I opened the second envelope
prepared to whoop with joy. But I had failed. I had failed the algebra exam, the
one that I absolutely needed to pass. Ken-chan, you a fraud. I was in shock.
I was also seized by a rational sense of disbelief. I couldnt have done so poorly.
I ran to the graduate office and requested a photocopy of my algebra exam. I
stormed off home with it to perform an autopsy.
Immediately on my arrival, I added up my points. I added them up again, and
the sum again refused to rise above the magical sixty percent. How could I have
screwed up so badly? I went through the test, question by question. What was
this? Here was a problem that I had certainly solved correctly, but I hadnt been
given any credit for it. Give me those points, and I pass. I was exultant, but I
required corroboration.
In a fit of self-righteousness, I felt that I had to locate someone in a position of
authority immediately to countermand my failure. I would explain my solution,
and I would be reinstated among the elect. My nightmare would be over.
Professor Elman, who had taught the first-year graduate course in abstract alge-
bra, was the person I needed to talk to. I looked up his number in the phone
book, and I called him at home. I read him my solution, and he agreed that it was
indeed correct and that I should have received credit for it. But then he added, to
my horror and disbelief, that a mere passing grade in my chosen field was not
good enough. That I had passed the exam did not mean that I had performed
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CHAPTER 25
adequately. If I planned to write a thesis in abstract algebra, I should have aced

the exam. Squeaking by with a pass would not augur well for my future success.
I hung up the phone completely deflated. I sat on the couch in our dump of a
room stunned, frozen in fear and chagrin. I had passed both exams. I had not
failed. I had been successful. A pass was a pass, wasnt it? Why did Professor
Elman not see it that way?
I was angry. I had some important business to attend to, and I wanted it to be
accompanied by the triumph of the successful completion of my qualifying
exams. I did not need to be told, yet again, that I was not good enough. So I left
Westwood in anger. My classmate Bruce Abe and I rented a car and drove the
nearly thirteen hundred miles to our destination. I had a lot on my mind on the
drive as Elmans words reverberated in a continuous loop. At times, they assumed
a familiar accented drawl: Ken-chan, passing grade not good enough. You need
do much, much better. We crossed the searing Nevada desert, and after a brief
stop in Salt Lake City to see Bruces mother, we arrived in Missoula, Montana.
I had come to Missoula to get married. The long drive had been good for me.
I was able to decompress and get that infinite tape loop about my failure in
abstract algebra out of my system. By the time we got to Erikas parents house,
my sense of doom was long gone. I was thinking about my new life with Erika.
Jan and Robin Anderson, Erikas parents, are the friendliest people I have ever
known. They are constantly inviting people to their home, be it relatives, friends,
or even friends of friends. And so there was never any question as to where the
wedding ceremony would be held. It had to be at their cedar-clad mountain
home, which overlooks the Missoula Valley with the majestic Bitterroot
Mountains on the horizon.
Erika and I were married on June 23, 1990, on the front lawn of her parents
home. It was a beautiful day shared with many friends and family members,
including my parents and both my brothers, who had flown out for the occasion.
Amazingly, my uncle and aunt Yoshitaka and Natsue Nomachi arrived by plane
from Tokyo. Ron, my Pepsi-Miyata teammate, was one of my groomsmen.
Erikas sister, Holly, was our maid of honor, and Santa was my best man. Momoro
played a lovely rendition of Pachelbels Canon for the opening processional. We
recited our vows and then enjoyed grilled salmon, wonderful music performed
by our families, and dancing on a makeshift platform well into the night.
The wedding festivities provided a much-needed escape from my qualifying
exam nightmare. June 23 would now be a special day for the rest of our lives. We
had no idea that it would soon be important to us for another reason. One of the
most important events in my life would take place three years later to the day. Its
not what you think.
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GROW I NG PA I N S
Newlyweds (photo by Jan

Anderson)
Erika and I returned to Westwood as a married couple, and we moved into a

small studio apartment a few blocks from the one I had shared with Brad. We
bought our first car, a dark blue Hyundai Excel hatchback. It was more go-kart
than car. We bought the cheapest model, the one where none of the buttons on
the control panel actually did anything. Erika found work in a Beverly Hills
office, where her boss was Kelly Stone, the sister of Sharon Stone, the sultry
Hollywood actress who was about to star with Michael Douglas in the psycho-
thriller Basic Instinct. Thanks to Kelly, Erika and I would end up meeting all
sorts of Hollywood figures. In fact, one of those Hollywood connections would
soon get us our second apartment. We had gotten a tip on a rent-controlled
apartment in Santa Monica from an actress who had a minor role in the TV soap
opera General Hospital.
That apartment was a cute little bungalow on 16th Street, one block from
Montana Avenue. We loved the location. I went for runs to the beach on pictur-
esque San Vincente Boulevard, and we made frequent trips to the Third Street
Promenade, where it was not unusual to bump into a celebrity such as Jane
Fonda, Julia Roberts, Arnold Schwarzenegger, O.J. Simpson, or Ted Turner,
among too many others to mention.
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Early married life is a sweet time of transition, and for me, part of the sweet-
ness was putting things in perspective and adopting a longer view of the future.
As I reflected on my first year at UCLA, I came to realize that Professor Elman
had been right about my relationship to abstract algebra. He was very wise, and
he understood what was best for me. If I was going to train as an algebraist, it
wasnt enough merely to pass the abstract algebra qualifying exam. I needed to
ace it. I had to prove to myself and my professors that I was a worthy PhD can-
didate, one whom a potential advisor would be eager to take on. Professor Elman
had thrown down the gauntlet, and I eagerly took it up with a vow not merely to
pass abstract algebra, but to master it.
I realized that my earlier approach of reviewing and memorizing old exams
was inadequate. It was more important to understand the underlying theorems,
structures, and techniques than to know how to solve a small subset of all the
possible problems that might be thrown at me. This time, I prepared with a com-
pletely different attitude. My goal was to try to understand the material well
enough to teach the course. It is said, after all, that one never really learns a sub-
ject until one has taught it. And if I ultimately finished my doctorate and obtained
a university position, then I would be expected to teach such a course. I
approached my studies as though I were training for an important race. I sys-
tematically studied every theorem, how it was proved and to what kinds of prob-
lems it could be applied. The next time the exam was offered, I took it with
confidence. I answered all the questions, completing the exam in half the allotted
time. I knew that I had throttled it. I was so happy that I left the exam room
hooting and fist pumping for joy.
Soon after I passed my qualifying exams, I was awarded a masters degree.
This meant that I was due a small raise as a teaching assistant. But I had a differ-
ent idea. I applied for a full-time teaching position at Woodbury University, a
small school in Burbank. Amazingly, they offered me a job teaching three college
algebra courses a semester at a salary of $25,000. That was a huge raise over my
teaching assistantship. Moreover, I could teach the early morning classes, the
ones nobody else wanted to teach. By taking the job, I would earn a much higher
salary, obtain valuable teaching experience, and still be able to work toward my
doctorate by attending classes and seminars in the afternoon at UCLA.Some of
my professors and classmates questioned my decision, arguing that it would take
time away from my studies. As it turned out, it was one of the best decisions I
ever made, for at Woodbury, I learned that I love to teach.
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Part IV
Finding My Way
Chapter 26

MY TEACHER
I
finally passed my remaining qualifying exams, and on paper, I had earned
the right to advance to candidacy in the UCLA doctoral program. This
may have been true on paper, but in reality, I had no idea what I was sup-
posed to do next. I was poised to drift through the program or else drift right out
of it. I needed direction.
In the spring of 1991, I took an algebraic number theory course from Professor
Basil Gordon. Gordon loved the material, and the students in the class could
sense his deep devotion to the subject. While Hersteins lectures in his number
theory class at UChicago were intimidating tirades, Gordons lectures were
inspirational sermons. It was like being at a poetry reading. For him, a theorem
was not just some odd mathematical fact. It was a work of art whose aesthetic
qualities could be described, as could its place in the ongoing intellectual dia-
logue of mathematics and the questions it raised for further research. Gordon
would sometimes compare a theorem to a famous work of art or classic poem. It
was not unusual for him to juxtapose the majesty of a theorem of Gauss with the
breathtaking beauty of a Michelangelo sculpture. I soon understood that
Gordons relationship with mathematics was unusual. He viewed himself as an
artist whose medium happened to be mathematics. It was clear that he thought
about mathematics in a way that was very different from my view, which had
always involved performance on exams and the memorization of formulas and
proofs. I wanted to know more, and I didnt have to wait long to get my chance.
It was several weeks into the course, during a lecture about ideal class groups,
a subject developed by Gauss a century and a half earlier. Gordon was just finish-
ing the proof a theorem about prime-order torsion elements in these groups
using a method introduced decades earlier by MIT mathematician Nesmith
C.Ankeny and Penn State professor Sarvadaman Chowla. As I listened, it began

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to dawn on me that there was a much more conceptual proof that made use of
elliptic curves. After Gordon completed the proof, I raised my hand and offered
my alternative proof, which made use of geometric ideas of Mordell and Weil.
Gordons response was to ask my classmates to applaud my proof, and he invited
me to his office after class.
I nervously made my way to his office, worried that he would scold me for my
presumptuousness. Had he been mocking me when he asked the class to applaud?
Gordons office seemed strangely out of place at UCLA.It could have been the
office of an Oxford don or one from the Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter
novels. The walls were lined with beautiful barrister bookcases, their contents
beckoning from behind hinged glass doors. An enormous ornate Persian carpet
graced the floor, concealing the weathered 1960s-era floor tiles. The desk over-
flowed with papers and letters, nearly enveloping a set of antique gold pens.
I was in the presence of a gentleman, someone whom I could imagine sitting
by the fireplace with G.H.Hardy in the Reading Room at Trinity College enjoy-
ing a cup of tea. Gordon and Hardy? Come to think of it, Hardy had also com-
pared mathematics to art, music, and poetry; perhaps I was onto something.
Gordons manner evoked images of a different time and place, perhaps a
nineteenth-century English manor. Our discussion was brief. Although the
proof I had offered in class was not a new result, he had been impressed with my
insight. He had been following my career at UCLA, and he told me that he would
be honored to be my doctoral advisor. He was thinking about retirement, and he
wanted me as his final PhD student. Although I was surprised and puzzled by his
offer, I accepted on the spot. That meeting with Gordon marked my birth as a
mathematician.
Basil Gordon was indeed a gentleman and a scholar, a polymath who was a
direct descendant of the Gordon family of British distillers, producers of
Gordons gin. He was the step-grandson of the famous American general George
Barnett, who served as the major general commandant of the Marine Corps dur-
ing World War I.I was pleased to learn that we had both grown up in Baltimore.
He had attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and received his masters degree
in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1953. He earned his doctorate
in mathematics and physics from Caltech in 1956 working under the mathema-
tician Tom Apostol and the iconic physicist Richard Feynman. Gordon was
drafted into the U.S.Army, where he worked with rocket scientist Wernher von
Braun. He was part of the team that worked out the path of the satellite Explorer
I so precisely that it remained in orbit for a full dozen years after its launch in
1958. Gordon joined the UCLA faculty in 1959.
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M Y T E AC H E R
With Basil Gordon in 1992 (photo by Keith Kendig)
Gordon and I developed an unusual routine. Instead of weekly sessions in his

office at UCLA, we met at his home in Santa Monica. Gordon lived in an elegant
house on Palisades Avenue, a quiet street a few blocks from Santa Monica Beach,
about a mile from our bungalow on 16th Street. That was convenient for me, and
since our meetings would last for hours, working with him at his home on
Saturdays meant that we could work without interruption. That home was more
museum than residence. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books, a
grand piano, and antique crystal. Original works of art adorned the walls.
We rarely began our meetings by diving straightaway into the mathematics.
Instead, Gordon might begin by playing a Chopin nocturne on the piano.
Sometimes, he would recite poetry from memory. Gordon had a photographic
memory and could effortlessly quote reams of literature. I recall him intoning
the first few pages of Melvilles Moby Dick. Hed close his eyes, entering a trance-
like state, and then begin:
Call me Ishmael. Some years agonever mind how long preciselyhaving

little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore,
I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
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To leave the safe familiarity of the shore and sail off into unknown territory,
that is what it is like to do mathematics. Gordon was constantly reminding me
that our mathematical research, as difficult and as confusing as it can be, is an art
form, an exploration, an adventure, something to be appreciated, something to
be lived. How could we possibly prove a good theorem if we viewed mathematics
as a chore? We werent hanging sheetrock, we were creating a masterpiece, culti-
vated over weeks, months, even years of deep thought and imagination. And so
it was music and poetry that set the tone before we began scribbling figures and
equations on our yellow pads.
I learned a great deal from Gordon on those Saturday afternoons. We would
spend hours huddled in his den, struggling with difficult concepts, trying to
break an impasse and find a way to bridge a logical gap in an argument. From
time to time, on rare occasions made the sweeter for their rarity, we were
rewarded with a breakthrough, an elegant argument, a watertight proof. Those
moments of revelation were so awesomely gratifying that we quickly forgot the
doubt and despair that can creep into the soul when one has lost ones way.
Then we might go out for lunch at the corner Italian bistro, followed by a
long walk to the beach. We must have looked an odd couplean Asian-
American young man in his early twenties with a mullet haircut and neon
clothes strolling slowly with a sixty-year-old gentleman, nose painted in zinc
oxide, dressed in khaki pants, polo shirt, and low-cut white canvas sneakers.
Perhaps not so odd; this was, after all, Southern California. But anyone catch-
ing snippets of our conversation would have been baffled by our passionate
outpourings about continued fractions, modular forms, and Galois represen-
tations. Of course we were passionate. We were talking about great mathemati-
cal works of art created by the likes of Gauss, Euler, Galois, Serre, Shimura,
Taniyama, Weil, and, of course, Ramanujan.
From Basil Gordon I learned what it means to do mathematics. When I was
a child, I understood as a child, and I thought that math was only about manipu-
lating numbers and solving for x. In college, I thought mathematics was about
memorizing theorems and proofs, mastering techniques for carrying out diffi-
cult calculations, and solving textbook problems.
Gordon taught me that doing mathematics begins with a state of mind that
allows you to travel to a place deep inside the subconscious to open body, mind,
and spirit to the contemplation of a mathematical idea. Doing mathematics is a
mental voyage in which clarity of thought and openness to insight make it pos-
sible to see the deeper beauty of a mathematical structure, to enter a world where
triumph over a problem depends less on conscious effort than on confidence,
creativity, determination, and intellectual rigor.
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M Y T E AC H E R
Although I had never practiced such meditative techniques with mathemat-

ics, it sounded just like what I had been doing for years on my bicycle, when, for
example, on my solo training rides, I was racing the likes of Eddy Merckx up the
imagined slopes of Mont Ventoux. The state of complete concentration that I
achieved helped me find the strength to pedal a higher gear, propelling me a bit
faster than I thought I could manage. Gordon taught me that a similar practice
could be instrumental in discovering and proving difficult theorems that might
otherwise be off limits.
When I do math now, I enter a trancelike state in which I travel to a special
place to visit my old friends, objects called tau, p(n), and f(q). If you looked at
me while I was working at home, you might think that I had dozed off. I also do
much of my best work on long solo runs and rides on my mountain bike. Those
activities make me more alert and mentally productive, both while I am exerting
myself physically and in the hours afterward.
I would later find my spiritual self. Like many scientists, I would come to
believe that the unimaginable complexity and symmetry exhibited by numbers
can be nothing less than evidence of their divine origin. The deep trancelike
states and the mental freedom that I achieve in running and cycling are spiritual.
They give me an openness of mind and soul that allows mathematical secrets to
be revealed. Perhaps it is something like what Ramanujan experienced when he
received visions from the goddess Namagiri.
Gordon encouraged me to study the theory of modular forms, a subject that
has its origins in much older works of Euler and Jacobi. He steered me in the
direction of the more modern treatment of the subject as developed by Pierre
Deligne, the Belgian mathematician who proved a conjecture of Weil that in
turn solved a problem of Ramanujan. He also had me study papers by the French
mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre, who together with Weil inspired my father
and the other young Japanese mathematicians at the 1955 TokyoNikko
conference.
I learned that the work of Deligne and Serre on a subject called modular
Galois representations was somehow rooted in the work of Ramanujan. I had not
thought about Ramanujan for two years, and so it came as a surprise to learn that
his work played a role in the development of cutting-edge mathematics. Serre
wrote a lovely article in 1973in which he explained how the English mathemati-
cian Swinnerton-Dyer had recast some old results of Ramanujan, who had
obtained them by means of the masterful manipulation of power series, into the
geometric framework of infinite Galois theory that Deligne was developing.
Ramanujans formulas, known as congruences for tau, exemplified and some-
how anticipated the deep conjectures of Serre that Deligne was proving at the
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CHAPTER 26
time, work that contributed to the Fields Medal that Deligne was awarded in
1978. (Serre was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954. Serre and Deligne are two of
only four mathematicians to have been awarded the Fields Medal, the Wolf
Prize, and the Abel Prize.) Delignes research proved Ramanujans congruences
as well as the far-reaching Weil conjectures. Ramanujans seemingly old-
fashioned formulas seemed deeply and strangely intertwined with the ultra-
modern theories developed by those great mathematicians.
My dissertation research was forging another connection to Ramanujan. It
would not be long before that connection would be transformed into a personal
search for Ramanujan the mathematician. But I still had to go a very long dis-
tance out of my way before that would happen.
During my second year at UCLA, Robert Kanigel published his book The
Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. I bought the book as
soon as it came out and almost devoured it in a single sitting. It offered vivid
descriptions of exotic sites in south India, and it filled in many details about
Ramanujans life, about which I had actually known quite little. Ramanujan sud-
denly became for me more than a source of magical formulas. He became a
mystical figure whose life seemed to contradict every stereotype I had of math-
ematicians. Kanigels description of Ramanujans life made it seem like some-
thing more out of the Arabian Nights than the history of twentieth-century
mathematics. It was a most improbable tale.
After finishing the book, I felt that I would like one day to make a trip to India
to pay homage to Ramanujan. Later, that desire would grow to the point that I
would feel compelled to make a pilgrimage to search for Ramanujan himself, the
mathematician and the man. It would become my calling.
Kanigels book included expert commentary from mathematicians George
Andrews, of Penn State, and Bruce Berndt, of the University of Illinois. Berndt
was devoting his career to working out Ramanujans unproven claims, systemati-
cally working through his writings, making sense of the Indian geniuss asser-
tions and supplying proofs wherever they were lacking. This task would take
him decades to complete, and he did not work alone. He enlisted the help of
many mathematicians, mostly doctoral students and newly minted PhDs. Berndt
was a mathematical guru, who helped many young mathematicians at early
stages of their careers. Although I didnt know it at the time, those two men,
Andrews and Berndt, would soon play important roles in my own life.
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M Y T E AC H E R
George Andrews in 2008

(photo courtesy of the
American Mathematical
Society)
Bruce Berndt with

Ramanujans slate in the
1980s (photo courtesy
of Bruce Berndt)
For the next two years, I worked on my dissertation and taught classes at
Woodbury. I filled my need for physical activity as a slow member of the Santa
Monica Track Club, which boasted Olympic gold-medalist Carl Lewis among its
lightning fast members. Erika and I enjoyed life as a young married couple in
picturesque Santa Monica. It should have been a halcyon time, but in the depths
of my psyche lurked still the parental voices that ate away at my self-esteem like
the eagle gnawing eternally at Prometheuss liver. I survived thanks to Erikas and
Gordons nurturing. Without either of them, I would have surely dropped out of
UCLA, perhaps creating a second black hole of memories.
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I didnt expect that my thesis would be of interest to many mathematicians,

but that didnt bother me. A thesis is supposed to be the first step in the life of a
professional mathematician, not the final magnum opus. Gordon had taught me
to love mathematics for its own sake, and that discovery sustained me. My goal
was to finish the dissertation, and Gordon assured me that I was well on my way
to success. Strangely, I believed him. We were having a wonderful time proving
theorems, and proving them for their own sake.
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Chapter 27

HITTING BOTTOM
Montana (1992)
B
asil Gordon had awakened me. I had been dangerously adrift at UCLA,
and his mentoring coaxed me back into the life I was meant to lead.
Like Ramanujan, I had developed an addiction for mathematics. I was
in love with mathematical beauty. I had a passion for doing mathematics. Yet I
had no idea how things might turn out for me professionally. Desire does not
always lead to fulfillment. Would my theorems be good enough for anyone to
care about? Might I have a thesis in me but not much else?
Although I was pleased with Gordons assessment of my progress, I didnt
entertain any thoughts of a top-flight research career. The voices in my head told
me that I had no chance. So I set my sights lower. My wish was to land a position
at the University of Montana in Missoula, Erikas hometown. To secure a teach-
ing position at UM would have been a dream come true. We would have bought
a house near campus and set down roots in that lovely college town, with Erikas
family nearby.
In the spring of 1992, I learned about a conference in Missoula, one that I
thought might offer the opportunity of a lifetime. The Pacific Northwest Sectional
Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) would be held at
the University of Montana in June. I was ecstatic to learn that the distinguished
plenary lecturer at the meeting would be Bruce Berndt, the celebrated Ramanujan
expert about whom I had just read so much in The Man Who Knew Infinity. He
was also masterfully training many young mathematicians. If I could meet him,
then maybe he could help me, just as Andr Weil had helped my father in 1955
at the TokyoNikko conference.

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C H A P T E R 27
I couldnt believe my luck. History seemed poised to repeat itself. The planets
were in alignment, and good fortune was headed my way. I made plans to take
full advantage of the opportunities. I would attend the conference and there
make a name for myself, impressing both Berndt and the math faculty at the
University of Montana.
Another and much larger meeting was scheduled four weeks after the
Missoula meeting: the Rademacher Centenary Conference at Penn State.
George Andrews, the celebrated Ramanujan scholar whom I first saw on TV at
my frat house in 1988, was one of conference organizers. He had earned his
PhD under Hans Rademacher, a mathematician whose fame was rooted in work
that perfected one of Ramanujans most important theorems. Andrews was one
of the organizers of this conference to honor the centenary of his advisors birth.
Both Andrews and Berndt would be there, and Gordon also was among the
invited speakers.
Together with Gordon, I hatched a plan: I would submit abstracts to both
conferences proposing short contributed talks. I would also write some of the
UM math faculty and offer to give a seminar before the MAA meeting in
Missoula. I had a place to stay, the comfort of Erikas childhood home. Gordon
believed in me, and he assured me that I was ready for both meetings.
I asked Doug Bowman, one of Gordons other PhD students, to accompany
me to Missoula. The promise of a road trip to Montana convinced Doug to
attend the meeting with me.
Like Ramanujan, Doug was a self-trained mathematician who recorded his
findings in notebooks. He studied a subject called q-series, which happened to
be one of Ramanujans areas of expertise. Doug had been publishing papers for
years, and as a result, he was attending UCLA on a prestigious graduate fellow-
ship awarded by the National Science Foundation.
Doug and I submitted our abstracts to the MAA meeting, and we were
delighted when they were both accepted. Through a family friend, I was intro-
duced by email to Professor George McRae, one of the senior professors in the
UM Department of Mathematics. He invited me to give a departmental seminar
before the scheduled meeting. More precisely, he kindly acceded to my offer to
present a seminar. My plan seemed to be working. I would get to meet the
famous Professor Berndt, and I would have an opportunity to impress the UM
faculty. All I had to do was deliver.
I prepared both Montana lectures with carerehearsing them several times.
Several days before the conference, Doug and I left Los Angeles in my go-kart of
a car. Since we had thirteen hundred miles to drive, it made sense to enjoy some
150
H I T T I NG BO T TOM
well-deserved R and R before the important seminar and conference. Erika

didnt come along; she couldnt get time off from work.
Doug and I enjoyed our road trip from Los Angeles to Missoula. We drove
through the searing desert in my car, which of course had no air conditioning,
listening to Liz Phair, New Order, and other alternative rock bands. We spent a
day in Las Vegas, walking the Strip and playing the slots at Circus Circus. We
also made a side trip to Bryce Canyon National Park to marvel at the enormous
amphitheaters of inverted red rock spires.
We were both excited to meet Bruce Berndt, and I was hopeful that the trip
would lead ultimately to a job for me at UM.We couldnt stop talking about what
we hoped would happen in Missoula.
Instead, disaster struck for me, and it struck twice. My seminar at UM was an
unmitigated catastrophe. I had devoted my fifty-minute lecture to describing my
research on Galois representations, a topic that I had been thinking about for
over two years. But nobody at UM, as I should have known, knew anything
about those objects. Like most research mathematicians, I was working in a sub-
specialty that few mathematicians working in other fields would understand. I
suppose I had figured that if I, a mere third-year graduate student, understood
the stuff, then all those senior professors should understand it too. I should have
been talking in broad generalities about my subject rather than the minute
details that only experts in the field would care about.
But I wanted to make an impression, and I figured I could do that by present-
ing the theorems that I had proved. So I began my lecture with a short and per-
functory introduction, so as to leave ample time for the exposition of my results.
Imagine that you are a rocket engineer invited to lecture about rocket design
to a room of engineers who are not, if you will pardon the expression, rocket
scientists. You begin your lecture with a slide of a slingshot, followed by a brief
history of ballistics and the early history of rocketry. But after five minutes of
this, you jump into your minuscule area of expertise and spend the next forty-
five minutes explaining in painful detail the calculations behind the latest
improvements to oxidizer design. I was the mathematical version of that mis-
guided engineer.
The rest of my talk was confusing and frustrating to the audience. And con-
fused and frustrated audiences tend to stop listening after a few minutes. I doubt
that anyone in the room paid any attention to my lecture after the first five or ten
minutes. They were lost, and it was my fault for not taking the time to motivate
my subject. In fact, my talk should have been mostly motivational with a brief
mention of my results at the end. My theorems were the equivalent of oxidizer
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C H A P T E R 27
design. They did not merit such a full-court press in a presentation to a general
audience. But I had wanted to strut my stuff.
After my lecture, McRae kindly offered me a bit of advice. I had not thought
carefully about my audience. McRae was a gentleman, a warm man whom I con-
tinue to revere. Yet his soothing words were quickly forgotten when another pro-
fessor approached me in the presence of many others in the department lounge.
Sputtering with rage, he reproached me for wasting his time, fuming, I have to
say, I am a world leader in my field, and you arent. Have something to say before
you decide to talk. He then turned on his heels and stormed off, shaking his head
in disgust without giving me an opportunity to apologize. What could I have said?
As a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, I was an inexperienced lecturer, and
the UM seminar was my first such presentation. I was devastated.
McRae overheard a bit of the conversation, and he tried to mollify me. He
whispered that this professor had a reputation as an imperious grouch, who, far
from being a world leader, actually had difficulty getting his papers accepted for
publication.
But his words didnt help. I was beyond help. I hadnt given McRae, or anyone
else, any reason to believe that I had proven much of anything. And in any case,
my primary goal in giving the seminar should have been to prove that I was
knowledgeable about my subject and could present my work to a diverse audi-
ence of mathematicians. I had done everything wrong, and I was distraught. I
had hoped to impress the faculty, and instead I had fallen flat on my face. It
didnt matter whether my theorems were worth anything. I had given such a
poor lecture that nobody was able to evaluate what I had done, not even the
context in which I had done it. And I had pissed off a senior professor to boot.
Talking to Erika on the phone that night, I learned that she had attended high
school with the angry professors son. And so a person who might well have been
an advocate for me when I applied for a position at UM now despised me for
wasting his time. The voices in my head had a new companion, another real live
person to join my parents and the junior professor at Chicago. And this voice
belonged to a mathematics professor at UM who even knew Erikas family. It was
humiliating. I worried that news of my poor performance would reach Erikas
parents. What would they think? I had arrived in Missoula hoping to make friends
and influence people, and instead I had made an enemy and alienated everyone.
Disaster struck again a few days later at the MAA conference. After Berndts
breathtaking plenary lecture on Ramanujan, Doug and I gave our contributed
talks. I had carefully prepared a set of overhead projector transparencies, and I felt
unable to modify my talk based on what I had learned from my failure at the UM
seminar. Going into the talk, I knew I was in trouble. I was a dead man walking.
152
Berndt attended both of our talks. He congratulated me on an interesting

presentation, but I could tell that he was just being polite. On the other hand,
Berndt was deeply impressed by Dougs talk, and at lunch, I overheard him invite
Doug to apply for a tenure track position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, one of the top mathematics departments in the country.
Doug had done me a favor by agreeing to accompany me to Montana in the
first place, and he had offered lots of sage advice on our long drive from Los
Angeles to Missoula. And then at the meeting, which was so important to me, it
was he who had ended up as the young star. He had been the one to impress
Berndt, and I was at most a mere afterthought.
Doug certainly deserved the recognition he had received. But his stunning suc-
cess and my abject failures were more than I could take. I told myself that I was
happy for him, but actually, I was furious at him. I felt betrayed. I was the one who
needed a success, and he had stepped in and carried off the prize. You, too,
Brutus, I kept repeating, although neither Doug nor anyone else had stabbed me
in the back. It was more like I had shot myself in the foot. Both feet, to be precise.
The voices in my head, the ones I had been struggling with for almost ten
years, had been vindicated. I was no good, and despite my meticulous planning
and preparation, I had failed, and my friend served as a barometer by which I
could measure my inadequacy. Some are born great, some achieve greatness,
says Shakespeare, but some, like me, are born to fail and achieve failure. My
parents had always been critical of me, and now I worried that word of my disas-
trous performance would reach Erikas parents. I had come to Missoula with
such high hopes. The result was worse than anything I could have imagined.
The last day of the conference included a social event at Salish-Kootenai
College, in Polson, a one-hour drive from Missoula, where the lectures had been
held. Doug and I had planned to drive together. But then Doug accepted an
invitation to ride along with Berndt, who was clearly courting him. There wasnt
room in the car for me, and since I had my own car, I decided to drive alone.
I like to drive with the radio on. But in the mountains of western Montana in
1992, my little go-kart couldnt tune in any stations. It was raining, and I had
only the voices in my head to keep me company:
Ken-chan, you work hard, but you not goodenough. Some professors
kind to you, but you should not trust people who only have kind words.
The critical professor is the one who speaks truth. Truth is that you
wasting peoples time.
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C H A P T E R 27
I had spent months preparing for my seminar and the contributed talk. Erika
and I had talked at length about our high hopes for the future. We believed that
Berndts presence and my seminar in her hometown were omens of imminent
good fortune. We had even tempted fate by looking into the price of houses near
campus. What was I going to tell her? How could I tell Erika that I had destroyed
our chance for happiness? Ken-chan, you spoil everything.
On the road to Polson, near a place called Ronan, there is a long straight sec-
tion that stretches a mile or two downhill. From the top of the hill you can see
oncoming traffic long before it reaches you. When I saw a logging truck
approaching in the distance, a plan of escape began to unfold. I visualized in
slow motion the truck smashing into my car, first crumpling the hood, followed
by a beautiful spider-web pattern of shattered windshield exploding in my face
in a violent shockwave of wind, glass, and rain. The truck came closer and closer,
and when it was close enough for my purposes, I swerved across the yellow line.
I dont know what saved me. Perhaps it was the frantic blare of the truckers
horn. All I can recall is coming to a stop on the side of the road and sitting in the
car in the pouring rain with the engine running, shaking and dripping with
sweat. I thank God for saving my life.
I couldnt believe what I had almost done. Thwarted by the outcome of the
disastrous meeting, I had lost all hope, and I was no longer myself. My actions
seemed eerily to mirror Ramanujans own suicide attempt when his nomination
for a Trinity College fellowship was denied. I had never had suicidal thoughts
before, and I was frightened by what I had almost done. It was an impulsive act
that I will never fully understand.
The next day, Doug and I left Missoula for our long drive back to Los Angeles.
He had impressed a world expert, and his career was about to take off. (Two
years later, Doug accepted a position at Urbana-Champaign.) Although I was
happy for him, or at least thats what I told myself, hearing him talk about his
unexpected good fortune was maddening. I felt that I was on the verge of a ner-
vous breakdown. I couldnt escape the sense that the voices in my head had tri-
umphed, and they were predicting a bleak and shameful future. There would be
no Andr Weil to discover me as he had discovered my father in 1955. If there
was ever a confluence of events that was supposed to serve that purpose, this
meeting had been it. Ken-chan, you impostor. You sweet-talk Paul Sally and
Basil Gordon. Now you see what you really worth.
I had hit bottom, and just when things had been looking up. Gordon had
transformed me. I was now a budding mathematician who saw beauty in formu-
las and theories. I couldnt stop thinking about mathematics. I had become
154
addicted to mathematics like Ramanujan. But the rejection of my work, when I

was so passionate about it, was almost more than I could take. That it wasnt
actually my work that been rejected, that I had simply given a couple of poorly
conceived presentations, was something I was unable to see at the time. Unlike
Ramanujan, who before being discovered by Hardy had been working all alone
without recognition and had every reason to be depressed, I had a mentor who
was carefully nurturing me. Nevertheless, in my depression I identified with
Ramanujan, perhaps as a way of feeding my self-pity.
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Chapter 28

A Miracle
Los Angeles (1993)
I
didnt tell Erika very much about the seminar and the conference. I
couldnt bring myself to admit to her that all our hopes had been dashed.
I couldnt tell her how badly I had failed. I also dreaded my next meeting
with Gordon. I had let him down. I had imagined a triumphal march down
Palisades Avenue to Gordons house to the sound of cheering crowds and pop-
ping champagne corks. In our time together, we had already had much to cele-
bratemastering a difficult research paper, completing the proof of a theorem,
the acceptance of a paper for publication. But there was nothing to celebrate
now. I had pain to share, and I wanted to spare him, and myself. On the day of
our usual meeting, I walked down Palisades Avenue accompanied by no sound
but my beating heart. I reached the house and stepped up onto the porch, and
then I froze. I must have stood for five fullminutes staring at the heavy oak door
before I could muster the courage to press the doorbell. I felt as if I had arrived
at my own funeral. What was I going to say?
I began our meeting by giving Gordon a play-by-play account of the Missoula
trip, and he listened attentively with his eyes closed, frowning and grimacing at
the most painful moments. I could see that he was sharing my pain, visualizing
the events as I retold them. I didnt tell him about my brush with death near
Ronan. I couldnt.
After I finished relating most of the sordid details, he took a deep breath, and
while staring off into the middle distance with his eyes wide open, he spoke
slowly and deliberately: If you can dream it, then you can do it. It would not
have been unusual for Gordon to have recited an epic poem or lines from
Shakespeare, but Disney? After a long pauseit must have been at least a
minutehe said it again, this time in full: If you can dream it, you can do it.

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chapter 28
Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.
After another long pause, Gordon began to tell me why he had asked me to be
his last PhD student.
He told me that he had felt that we were somehow destined to work as a team.
There had been signs. We were both raised in Baltimore, and we both were
identified as math prodigies at an early age. Although he had never met my
father in person, he had read his papers and books. He had studied my fathers
important theorems on Tamagawa numbers and algebraic tori, and he had
followed his more recent work in algebraic number theory. He was therefore
delighted when I registered for his algebraic number theory course, and he was
thrilled by my obvious interest in the subject.
Gordon saw beauty everywhere, but it was more than beauty. There was
something spiritual in the things of this world, but also in the creations of the
mind, so that along with Tennysons The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas,
the hills and the plains, he felt that art, music, poetry, and mathematics were
also the vision of a higher power. Without a family of his own, he viewed his
PhD students as his children, and in me he had felt a special bond that had
begun from his longtime admiration of my father. There could be no more
beautiful way to end his career than to advise me, poetically helping to extend
my fathers legacy.
He had realized early on that I needed not only mathematical advising, but
emotional support as well, and he had felt that he could provide both. He saw
that I, like many other graduate students, viewed the doctoral degree as the
single goal of graduate school, with coursework, qualifying exams, and the
dissertation a series of hurdles to be overcome. I had been seeking a credential
for the credentials sake, a ticket that would allow me to move on to the next
credential. Now after the many months we had spent working together, he
explained that I had been transformed, that mathematics was no longer for me a
means to an end but an end in itself. I had matured into a scientist. I was a math-
ematician. It was the creation of beautiful mathematics that was the true goal.
Then he thanked me for sharing my transformation with him. I couldnt believe
it; he was thanking me when I was the one who should have been thanking him.
Instead of dwelling on the pain of Missoula, he had redirected my thoughts.
I looked inside myself. He was right. I had become a different person. I was
enjoying mathematics for its own sake. Under Gordons tutelage, the walks on
the Santa Monica boardwalk, the poetry, the Chopin nocturnes, and the math-
ematics had transformed me. I saw the world differently, and I had become a
mathematician. And I was now able to see beauty everywhere around me.
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But why the Mickey Mouse quotation, I wondered. Gordon explained that his
first encounter with Mickey Mouse was in his role as the sorcerers apprentice in
the film Fantasia. When his master the sorcerer had gone to bed, leaving his
apprentice to carry heavy buckets of water to fill a cauldron, Mickey put on the
magicians hat and transformed a broomstick into a legion of water bearers. But
when the cauldron was full, Mickey was unable to find the magic formula to tell
the broomsticks to stop. A flood ensued, and Mickey was punished. He had
transgressed, had been a naughty mouse. But he had dared to attack a difficult
problem, and although he got himself into trouble, he went on to conquer the
world as one of the best-loved of all creatures, a mouse who brings a smile to
every face on the planet at the mere sight of his trademark ears.
Gordon said something like this:
Ken, be like naughty Mickey Mouse. You are already a magician creating
lovely mathematics. Mickey had an inauspicious beginning as the
apprentice. He tried to do something before he was ready. But he ultimately
triumphed and became a worldwide symbol of joy and magic. I predict that
you, too, will emerge as someone who was meant to follow in your fathers
footsteps. Your energy and youthful enthusiasm are palpable. I already see
it. Now, if you can dream it, you can do it.
I couldnt believe what I was hearing. His words vanquished the depression
that I had brought back with me from Missoula. Right at the moment that the
script called for criticismKen-chan, you screw upGordon offered me the
praise that I had so desperately sought as a tiger boy. But it was more than that.
He was in effect praising me for screwing up: Ken, you messed up, but thats
because you reached beyond your grasp. Now go out and conquer the world.
Gordons words became my battle cry. I had a new voice in my head: Ken, be
like naughty Mickey.
Mathematicians who knew me in the early 1990s will now understand why I
attended conferences wearing a stylish baseball cap emblazoned with the image
of Mickey Mouse. I didnt wear the cap as a souvenir of Disneyland or because I
wanted to be a Mouseketeer. I wore it to remind me of Gordons inspirational
words. That cap was my talisman.
That meeting with Gordon turned out to be one of the most uplifting moments
of my life, one whose memory brought me to tears a few years later as I attempted
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to recount it at a conference I had organized with George Andrews in honor of

Gordons sixty-fifth birthday. I wanted to tell the world how important Gordon
was to me.
It was time to get back to work. We had three weeks to prepare for the
Rademacher Centenary Conference at Penn State. Some of the most important
figures in algebraic number theory would be there: George Andrews (Penn
State), Bruce Berndt (University of Illinois), Dorian Goldfeld (Columbia
University), Harold Stark (UCSD), among many others. I had learned from the
mistakes I had made in Missoula, and together we prepared a talk for this high-
powered audience.
We huddled over the coffee table in Gordons reading room, scribbling an
outline, which we then shaped into a well thought out presentation that I later
printed on overhead transparencies. When we were done, the room was a sea of
paper, as if a powerful box fan had been turned on full blast in front of an unsus-
pecting stack of recycling paper.
Since Ramanujan scholars Andrews and Berndt would be in the audience, we
decided that I should speak about congruences for modular forms, the theory
that Deligne, Serre, and Swinnerton-Dyer had developed to explain some of
Ramanujans classic formulas. I had made some small contributions to the field,
and using Ramanujans well-known results as motivation, I hoped to keep the
attention of the audience long enough to explain my findings. And if I suc-
ceeded, then perhaps I would impress some experts with my results.
I began my presentation with Ramanujan, using his renown as a hook to draw
my audience in. Not that I needed a hook. In contrast to my lectures in Missoula,
this time I was speaking to an audience of experts in the field, a mathematicians
version of preaching to the choir. My lecture was well received, and I was even
invited to submit a paper to the conference proceedings. Several famous number
theorists approached me after my lecture, and they congratulated me on the nice
work I had done. Although my results didnt astound anyone, I had produced
respectable work that experts felt was worthwhile. As the German mathemati-
cian Leopold Kronecker wrote in a letter to his colleague Georg Cantor, quoting
an old saying, When kings are building, there is work for carters. He went on
to say that a mathematical researcher has to be both king and carter, but at this
stage of my career, and especially after the Missoula disaster, I was delighted to
earn praise for my yeoman work. After all, even Mickey Mouse had gotten his
start as a water carrier. Those number theorists had been kind, and they seemed
genuinely to want to encourage me as a junior member of their guild.
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In Lutherville after the Rademacher conference (left to right: Doug Bowman, Ken Ono,
Takasan)
With the success of the Rademacher conference buoying me up, I could look
back over the past eight years with a certain satisfaction. I had come a long way,
and as I traced my career from high school to college to graduate school, I saw a
common thread, and that thread was Ramanujan. When I was a high-school
student, Ramanujan, because he had been a hero to my father, had been the
Ariadnes thread that allowed me to escape the labyrinth in which I felt hope-
lessly trapped. Ramanujans story of achieving success by following his passion
even if it meant twice flunking out of college had inspired my father and then me
as well. Thanks to Ramanujan, for reasons that I still did not fully understand,
my parents had let me run away from my former life. Then when I was drifting
as an unmotivated college student, Ramanujan had given me hope, inspiring me,
just as my clock was running out, to apply myself to my studies, despite my fear
that I would discover that I wasnt good enough to be a mathematician. I did well
enough at UChicago to be rescued by Paul Sally, who went out of his way to help
me get into a graduate program.
Then as a graduate student, I had followed Ramanujans lead again. But now I
was following Ramanujans actual mathematics. I presented my work in the
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inspirational context of Ramanujans compelling story, and my talk was well

received. Each time I looked at a positive event in my life, there was Ramanujan.
I was making progress toward completion of my dissertation, and I had an
advisor who was fully committed to me. But that was not enough to subdue the
voices in my head. My parents continued to doubt my prospects, and I still
yearned for their acceptance and approval. My first published papers and my
lecture at the Rademacher conference werent sufficient to earn their praise. For
them, there was only one acceptable outcomewhich actually wasnt my goal
a position at the Institute for Advanced Study or at the very least a professorship
at a top university.
Even if it had been my goal, the harsh realities of the outside world continued
to confirm my feeling of inadequacy. The academic job market was brutal, and I
witnessed close friends suffer the indignity of a failed job search. There were a
few dozen graduate students at the Rademacher meeting at Penn State, and
many of them had presented results that were much more impressive than mine.
There would be postdoctoral fellowships for perhaps three or four of them, and
tenure-track positions, at schools I had never heard of, for a few others. The odds
were not in my favor. There certainly wouldnt be a job for me at Montana, and I
was afraid that there might not be a job for me anywhere.
Nevertheless, I had complete faith in Gordon, and I continued to work on my
thesis, creating mathematics for its own sake. At least now the negative voices in
my head had some competition: Ken, be like Mickey. If you can dream it, you
can do it.
I defended my dissertation in March 1993. I had worked out theorems that I
was passionate about. And they were mine. Like a sorcerer, I had conjured up a
proof that previously had not existed. And though I was still a sorcerers appren-
tice, I didnt have to fear that my theorems would get me in trouble. The only
danger was that they might not be good enough. But I had done my best.
Following my advisor as a role model, I had become a mathematician who pur-
sued the beauty of mathematics for its own sake, without worrying too much
about whether anybody would care about my work. But now it was time to
worry. If I didnt want to starve like Ramanujan, I was going to have to get a job.
And moreover, without a job, I would be even more at the mercy of my voices. I
wasnt confident that my results would pique the interest of many mathemati-
cians, and I feared that I wouldnt get any job offers from research universities.
At the time I defended my thesis, I had no job offers, and the annual hiring cycle
would soon be over.
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My failure to get any offers gave the voices in my head new power:
Ken-chan, your thesis not very good. You say you do math for own sake, but
results you get mediocre. You should have been studying all along instead of
riding bike and partying. The UChicago junior professor and Montana
professor both speaking truth. You wasting everybodys time.
Then ten weeks after I defended my thesis, in June 1993, by which time all the
postdoctoral fellowships and tenure-track positions had been filled, I received
an unexpected email from Andrew Granville, a British mathematician at the
University of Georgia. He was inviting me to apply for a one-year visiting posi-
tion; the math department at UGA, he wrote, needed one more instructor to
cover its fall courses. That email had come out of left field. I hadnt even applied
to UGA.But for whatever reason, I was being invited to apply for a job. If I was
interested, I should send my CV immediately to his colleague Carl Pomerance, a
UGA number theorist well known for his work on prime numbers.
I responded immediately to Granvilles request, but I was not optimistic that
my application would result in an offer. My two hundred job applications had
not generated a single interview, so why would the UGA solicitation yield any-
thing different? Perhaps the same email had been sent to thirty other new PhDs.
And suppose I was lucky enough to get the offer. What would be the point of
moving across the countrywithout Erika, who had another year of school
for a one-year job? And what would a one-year stopgap do to improve my future
prospects? It seemed much more likely that the job would only delay the inevi-
table realization that there was no place for me in academia.
Then on the morning of June 23, 1993, my third wedding anniversary, I heard
the most incredible news, news that would change my life. Wrapped in only my
bath towel, I sat down at my desk in our Santa Monica bungalow to read my
email before taking a shower. I was surprised to find dozens of messages. In the
early 1990s, before the era of web browsers and the need for spam filters, I
received fewer than half a dozen emails a day. Surprisingly, all of the messages
had the same subject line.
The story is told that the writers, critics, and actors who gathered daily in the
1920s at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch once held a contest to see who could
come up with the most shocking newspaper headline. Dorothy Parker, famous
for her acid wit, won with the two words Pope Elopes. To a mathematician, the
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subject line of all my emails was more shocking even than that: Wiles proves
FLT.
A few hours earlier, Andrew Wiles, of Princeton University, had announced a
proof of Fermats last theorem at a conference at the Isaac Newton Institute for
Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His announcement took
place in an auditorium a short walk from the same halls that Ramanujan had
roamed eighty years earlier.
Fermats last theorem was surely the most famous open problem in all of
mathematics. It all began around 1637, when the French jurist and amateur
mathematician Pierre Fermat wrote in the margin of his copy of Diophantus of
Alexandrias Arithmetica that he had discovered a truly marvelous proof of a
certain assertion, which this margin is too small to contain. The assertion is
easily stated. It involves only the counting numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on. What
Fermat claimed was that for every integer n>2, there are no nonzero integers a,
b, and c for which a + b = c . Of course, for n=2, there are such numbers a, b,
n n n
c, such as 32 + 4 2 = 52 and 52 + 12 2 = 132. Such examples have been known at

least since the time of Pythagoras, who lived more than two millennia before
Fermat. In fact, there are infinitely many such so-called Pythagorean triples, all
given as side lengths of right triangles. What Fermat was claiming was that for
every larger value of n, there are no such triples.
That marginal note came to the attention of the mathematical community
after Fermats death in 1665, when his son published a new edition of the
Arithmetica complete with Fermats marginal notes. For the next 350 years,
mathematicians failed to reproduce Fermats marvelous proof, and the consen-
sus is that he did not have such a proof. Indeed, although Fermat produced a
proof for the special case n = 4, the fact that he never mentioned his marvelous
proof again suggests that he realized that his method for the special case could
not be generalized.
Over the centuries, mathematicians chipped away at what came to be known
as Fermats last theoremso called because it was the last of his claims still lack-
ing a proof. In the process, a great deal of powerful and elegant mathematics was
created, comprising whole new branches of the subject. The fame of the Fermat
problem grew and grew, until Fermats last theorem could be found even in the
Guinness Book of World Records, where it was listed as one of the most difficult
mathematical problems.
Wiles had based his work on Berkeley mathematician Ken Ribets earlier
discovery that Fermats claim would follow from a verification of the modularity
conjecture, a bizarre claim about modular forms and elliptic curves that was first
stated by Yutaka Taniyama at the 1955 TokyoNikko conference, which had
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occasioned the pivotal event in my fathers life, being discovered by Andr Weil.
You could say that in the 350 years since Fermat, mathematics had gone a very
long distance out of its way to attack the Fermat problem, and Ribet had
suggested how it might be possible to come back a short distance correctly.
Amazingly, Wiless proof also made use of Galois representations, the subject I
had been studying in my thesis. I couldnt believe it.
The proof of Fermats last theorem became a major news item. A story
appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and Wiles was named one of
People magazines twenty-five most intriguing people of 1993, alongside the
likes of Oprah Winfrey and Bill and Hillary Clinton. I had no idea that these
events would soon change my life. After all, I had nothing to do with the proof
of Fermats conjecture.
A few days later, I received an offer from UGA.I suppose that the excitement
generated by Wiless proof of Fermats last theorem gave a mathematician who
studied modular forms, even a lowly one like me, a certain cachet. Emboldened
by the Fermat hoopla, I was poised to take the risk and accept the one-year UGA
offer. Without any other options, I had a simple choice: accept the UGA offer or
leave academia. When I asked Gordon what I should do, he said without hesita-
tion, Go to Georgia. But I could not think of accepting the offer without a
serious discussion with Erika, who would have to stay behind at UCLA to finish
her second bachelors degree. Erika agreed with Gordon, and I accepted the offer
that afternoon.
Now in addition to Ramanujan in my corner, I had Fermat. Everyone was
suddenly interested in the three topics that made up the title of Wiless famous
talk at Cambridge: Modular forms, elliptic curves, and Galois representations.
Those were all topics that I had studied in my dissertation, and I began to feel
that I had expertise that would be of interest to more than just a few of my
mathematician colleagues.
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MY HARDY
Athens, Georgia (19931994)
I
moved to Athens, Georgia, in August 1993. It was only a one-year posi-
tion, and after that, the future was as uncertain as ever. But I had done it. I
had completed my PhD.I was now Dr. Ken Ono, mathematician. To get
this far, I had not traveled an easy path, but inspired by Ramanujan and guided
by caring mentors such as my brother Santa, Paul Sally, and Basil Gordon, I had
achieved an important milestone. I had hoped that my accomplishment would
have elicited the recognition and praise from my parents that I had long sought
and now felt I merited. After all, earning a doctorate was part of the formula that
my parents had laid out for me long ago. It was a major accomplishment, and I
had come through. But I received no acknowledgment from them. I didnt
bother to go to my graduation ceremony, assuming that they wouldnt want to
attend. My father had advised a number of PhD students, and I would have
thought that he would appreciate what it meant to end ones apprenticeship and
set forth into the world as a certified member of the profession. I suppose he
viewed obtaining a doctorate as just one more chore that was expected of you,
like brushing your teeth or walking the dog.
I was now twenty-four years old, and I had quite given up hope of ever earn-
ing the praise that I had desperately sought earlier in my life. I had developed
defense mechanisms to protect my psyche. Basically, I simply buried my former
life. My years growing up in Lutherville were consigned to a black hole. I never
told anyone about the period of my life before UChicago. I rarely called home,
and I rarely communicated with my brothers. Instead, I had Erika nurturing me
at home, and I had Gordon nurturing me in my research. At Woodbury
University, where I had taught during my last years of graduate school, I was
nurtured by Zelda Gilbert, a psychology professor.

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I had survived by blocking out the past, and I could look forward to the future
with at least some optimism. I had not won one of the precious tenure-track jobs
or postdoctoral fellowships that would have set me on the path to a research
career, but the one-year position that I had been offered was beginning to look
like a terrific opportunity. Like Ramanujan, I had been discovered by an English
analytic number theorist, my own personal G.H.Hardy. I like to think of the
email that I had received from Andrew Granville telling me of the possibility of
a job at UGA as something like the letter Ramanujan received from Hardy in
response to his I beg to introduce myself letter. Excited by Hardys reply,
Ramanujan had proclaimed, I have found a friend in you, who views my labours
sympathetically. Those words echoed in my mind almost exactly eighty years
after they were written. And my Hardyand come to think of it, my Weil as
wellwould also prove to be my next mentor, nurturer, and friend.
Andrew Granville, a Cambridge-educated number theorist, was a budding
star at UGA, and it was he who had arranged the visiting assistant professorship
for me. It seems that I had impressed him at a conference earlier in the year, and
he wanted to learn about modular forms because of their role in the ongoing
work on Fermats last theorem. Without Andrews job offer, my career as a math-
ematician might have been over before it had begun, and now he was offering
me something more, the chance to work with him on mathematical research. It
was a wonderful opportunity, and I vowed to make the most of it.
With Andrew Granville in 2013
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M Y H A R DY
Athens, a charming college town sixty-five miles northeast of Atlanta, was

well known for its music scene, as the home of the rock band REM and the hip
music venue the 40 Watt club. Although Erika was unable to join me in Athens
for the year, she helped me make the move. We had never driven across the
United States, so we decided to take advantage of my move from the West Coast
to the Southeast to see a bit of what lies between. We packed the car with a few
of my belongings, mounted my fancy Team Miyata bicycle on the roof of our
little blue hatchback, and set off.
I wish I could write that the drive was uneventful, but that would be an
untruth. The drive was eventful, too eventful. First, we suffered our way across
the desert in our little go-kart without air conditioning. Then, somewhere in
Arizona, my bike slipped its tether and flew off the roof of the car. I gasped as I
watched the reflection of my expensive racing cycle bounce down the highway
in the rearview mirror. Thankfully, there were no other cars around. Amazingly,
my bike survived its attempted escape.
Near Tupelo, Mississippi, our car began to lose power. It refused to go faster
than forty miles an hour. We limped into town and found a service station. The
mechanic quickly diagnosed the problema malfunctioning catalytic converter.
He didnt have the parts; nobody in Tupelo had parts for a Hyundai. The Korean
automaker had no presence in the southeast at the time. The mechanic said that
he knew a lawnmower repairman who might be able to help us out. A lawn-
mower repairman? Was he kidding? Our little car might be a go-kart, but it was
no lawnmower. We decided to take our chances on the highway. Poking along at
forty miles per hour, we made it as far as Birmingham, Alabama, which became
the Hyundais final resting place. We were 220miles short of our destination.
I called Andrew from Birmingham and explained that we were having serious
car trouble and would likely arrive a day later than we had anticipated. Without
a second thought, he offered to make the long drive from Athens to fetch us. I
was stunned by his gracious offer, and although we didnt accept it, instead buy-
ing an eight-year-old red Honda sports car to complete the journey, I knew then
that I would be in good hands at UGA.That road trip was quite an experience,
and from it, we learned at least one important lesson: that Honda we bought may
have been old, but it had air-conditioning!
Although I was in Athens for only one year, it was an enormously significant
time as the last stage of my apprenticeship. Andrew guided my transition from
graduate student to young professor, showing what it meant to be a professional
mathematician, a colleague who not only does mathematics and teaches classes,
but shares in the responsibility of determining the future of the profession and
the subject.
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Although Andrew was only in his early thirties, he was way ahead of me pro-
fessionally and served as a perfect role model. He was producing huge volumes
of first-rate theorems, covering an unusually broad array of topics: binomial
coefficients, combinatorics, graph theory, prime numbers, to name but a few. His
work on prime numbers had earned him an invitation to speak at the 1994
International Congress of Mathematicians, one of the most coveted honors
awarded to research mathematicians. He was brilliantly advising several PhD
students, and I became in effect his postdoctoral advisee. Unlike that unfortu-
nate Hyundai, Andrew was firing on all cylinders. He is the role model that I
have done my best to emulate throughout my career.
We spent many hours doing math, gossiping about mathematicians, and
enjoying pints of Bass ale at the Globe, the local Bohemian pub popular among
the young faculty.
Like Sally and Gordon, Andrew believed in me, and that knowledge was a
comfort instead of a source of anxiety. Andrew treated me like a colleague. To
my surprise, he gave me early drafts of his papers and asked me to critique his
work and his writing. How had I earned the right to question and critique him?
He asked me to be a role model to his graduate students. What had I done to
merit that? I had been a graduate student myself just a few months earlier. Was I
worthy of being addressed as professor? Of course not, said the voices in my
head; to them, I was still an impostor.
Andrews unexpected show of respect for my opinions and judgment was eye-
opening. It told me that he genuinely believed in my mathematical ability and
competence. In a way, that quiet demonstration of respect was the ultimate
expression of praise and approval. Although it could never fill the void that only
parental praise and approval could satisfy, his confidence in me gave me strength.
It was just the boost I needed.
Concerning the right to ask questions, Andrew taught me that it is indeed a
right. It isnt a privilege granted only to the select few. It is a practice, he said, that
should be second nature to all scientists. Questioning leads to deeper and more
meticulous research and to more clearly presented results. It reveals new ave-
nues of inquiry. It is the engine of progress. The ability to ask a question is not
something you acquire with seniority. Instead, it is a skill that you must work on
at every stage of your development.
That realization gave rise to new voices in my head, voices that asked lots of
questions. My self-confidence as a mathematician was born out of those new
voices. They told me that I was adequate enough to formulate meaningful ques-
tions, and they began to take up the cudgels against the old voices that ham-
mered away at my self-esteem.
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Andrew and I wrote one joint paper that year in Athens. It was a semi-
important paper in representation theory. We completed a program that aimed
to classify the defect-zero p-blocks for finite simple groups, a project born out
of an old problem raised by the Harvard mathematician Richard Brauer in the
1930s. It is interesting to note that Brauer, like Weil, happened to be one of the
distinguished American delegates at the 1955 TokyoNikko conference. Our
result won me invitations to speak at several first-rate universities.
The most important ingredient in our proof was Delignes theorem, the work
I had studied with Gordon that confirmed a deep conjecture of Ramanujan. I was
thrilled to put Ramanujan to good use. His mysterious calculations had inspired
the deep mathematics that we needed to crack an unsolved problem in an area of
mathematics that didnt even exist during his lifetime. That is the magic of
Ramanujan. His formulas are prophecies that have anticipated important discov-
eries and have guided generations of mathematicians that followed him.
This was the second time that I had been rewarded for following Ramanujans
mathematics. The first had been at the Rademacher conference, where I had
presented my results in the context of Ramanujans formulas from almost a cen-
tury earlier. Now with Andrew, I had made use of a theorem that solved one of
Ramanujans claims, and we had settled an open conjecture. I was beginning to
get the idea that Ramanujan was more than an inspiration in my life. Perhaps I
was meant to follow Ramanujans mathematics, too. He had been the source of
everything good in my young career.
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Hitting My Stride
Urbana andPrinceton (19941997)
H
ardy had judged Ramanujan worthy and had invited him into the
community of professional mathematicians. Eighty years later,
Andrew Granville extended such an invitation to me, and like the
earlier pair, we collaborated on research. When we had completed our one joint
project, Andrew encouraged me to take aim at some well-known unsolved prob-
lems. My year at UGA was an important transition, one that I like to think of as
somewhat analogous to Ramanujans first days in Cambridge. We both had a lot
to learn about the world of professional mathematics, and we both had mentors
to guide our way.
Andrew helped me spread my wings in search of independence. He told me
that I was ready to fly solo and recommended that I study Gausss class numbers
and Eulers partition numbers. Andrew believed that my knowledge and ability
could lead me to exciting new results on these two types of numbers. I am
pleased to say that I lived up to his faith in me. In a project that would take five
years to complete, I obtained important results on Gausss class numbers in joint
work with Winfried Kohnen, of Heidelberg University.
In addition to my research, I was teaching several sections of calculus. I had
enjoyed teaching when I was in graduate school, and at UGA, I continued to find
teaching rewarding. One thing that struck me right away was that unlike my
students in Burbank, who always addressed me as Ken, here I was Professor,
or occasionally the more informal Sir. I felt that such formality created a bar-
rier between me and my students, but there was nothing I could do about
Southern decorousness, and I must admit that being addressed with such an
honorific for the first time in my life reinforced the positive voices that were

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beginning to do battle against the negative ones. I felt that in teaching, I was giv-
ing back something of what I had received from the many wonderful teachers,
going back to my earliest years, who had given me so much. I told my students
how much it meant to me to be their teacher, and even now, twenty years later, I
still hear from some of them from time to time. I have thereby learned that my
students take many different paths in life when then leave my class. I heard from
one student who is now a physician. Another competed in the 1996 Atlanta
Olympics representing Greece. One has become an accomplished botanist.
Teaching has become an integral part of who I am.
Now my first semester at UGA was coming to an end, and it was time to
think about the next academic year. There had been talk of an extension of my
UGA position for a second year, but nothing was certain, and so I was girding
myself for another grueling job search. In mid-December, I attended a confer-
ence in Asilomar, California, in the hope that my short contributed talk would
increase my visibility as I entered the job market. Even if only a dozen or so
mathematicians heard my presentation, being noticed by the right person
could lead to an offer.
Erika joined me for the conference. We drove up together from Los Angeles,
arriving early. Erika understood how important the conference was for my
careerI couldnt afford to have a repeat of Missoulaand so she suggested that
we take a walk on Asilomar Beach, on the picturesque Monterey Peninsula, a
few miles north of the fabled Pebble Beach Golf Course. I needed to clear my
mind and mentally prepare myself for the meeting. The cool, stiff ocean breeze
refreshed us as we strolled on the boardwalks that crisscross the natural dunes.
Erika reminded me that I had done good work, and as a result, good things were
bound to happen. Part of me knew that I indeed had begun to make my mark,
but hearing it from Erika, I began to believe that I really had something to offer
and that I would be able to put that across in my talk. As Erika encouraged me,
I heard echoes of Gordon: Be like Mickey. If you can dream it, you can do it.
Wearing my trademark Mickey Mouse hat, I was standing in line at the con-
ference registration desk waiting to get my information packet when one of the
organizers pulled me aside. He told me that the steering committee had decided
to offer a presentation that evening, after dinner, on the proof of Fermats last
theorem. Everyone wanted to know about the proof, and in particular, they all
wanted to know about modular forms and elliptic curves. Someone had recom-
mended me as the speaker. Would I give a talk on Wiles and Fermat?
Would I? I couldnt believe my good fortune. Although I had had absolutely
nothing to do with the proof, I was being given the opportunity to address my
fellow mathematicians because my small corner of mathematics had become
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H i t t i ng M y S t r i de
world news overnight. I took a hot shower, all the while saying, Oh my God, Oh
my God, Oh my God. Then I got to work and wrote the talk. I had learned from
my debacle at Missoula to gauge my audience. They didnt want the details of
Wiless proof. They wanted the big picture. I wrote out the main points by hand
on overhead transparencies. Everyone was there. My talk was well received, and
the next day, my contributed talk, on the rather abstruse topic of Shimura sums
related to quadratic imaginary fields, was packed. I began to believe that I might
actually have some sort of career as a mathematician.
I devoted the spring of 1994 to the other numbers that Andrew had called to
my attention: Eulers partition numbers. Ramanujan was the first mathematician
to obtain deep results about them. Although I didnt know it at the time, my
decision to work on these numbers marked the beginning of my search for
Ramanujan the mathematician. Although I had benefited from following
Ramanujans mathematics twice before, my decision to study partitions was a
dive headfirst into some of the deepest waters of Ramanujans mysteries.
Although I had other projects and plans, my commitment to Ramanujan had
been set in motion.
The partition numbers seem to arise from a childs counting game involving
only adding and counting. It is simple to explain what these numbers are about.
The equalities 3=2+1=1+1+1 illustrate that there are three ways of partition-
ing the number 3. Next, we can observe that 4=3+1=2+2=2+1+1=1+1+1
+1, which shows the five ways of partitioning the number 4. Repeating this pro-
cess of adding and counting for an arbitrary number n defines the partition func-
tion p(n). Thus our two examples are denoted by p(3)=3 and p(4)=5. The
partition numbers grow at an astonishing rate. One can calculate p(10)=42,
p(20)=627, p(30)=5604, p(100) = 190,569,292, and p(1000) = 24,061,467,864,
032,622,473,692,149,727,991.
Ramanujan proved very surprising divisibility properties for these numbers.
One of his mysterious identities involves the sequence of all partition numbers
of the form p(5n + 4). The first few numbers in the sequence are p(4)=5,
p(9)=30, p(14)=135, p(19)=490, p(24)=1575. Each of these numbers is a mul-
tiple of 5, and what Ramanujans identity showed is that p(5n+4) is a multiple of
5 for every value of n. He also proved analogous theorems for 7 and 11, namely
that for every n, p(7n+5) is a multiple of 7, and p(11n+6) is a multiple of 11.
These three statements, for the three primes 5, 7, and 11, are now known as
Ramanujans partition congruences.
It is natural to ask whether the primes 5, 7, and 11 are somehow special.
For the prime 2, for instance, is there a similar progression that yields only even
partition numbers? That is, do there exist a whole number A and a whole number
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B such that p(An + B) is always even for every value of n? Or is there an analo-
gous progression of partition numbers all of which are divisible by some larger
prime number, such as 13 or 677 or 7753?
Ramanujan touched on these questions with enigmatic words in a paper he
published in 1919, writing, It appears that there are no equally simple proper-
ties involving primes other than these three. For decades, mathematicians
were unsure what he meant. Did he know about or suspect properties for other
primes, but ones that were very difficult to describe? Or was Ramanujan conjec-
turing that there are no such properties at all for other primes?
Andrew suggested that I study this mystery for the prime 2. In the 1960s, the
Canadian-Indian mathematician M.V.Subbarao made Ramanujans enigmatic
claim precise in this case. He conjectured that there is no sequence like those
discovered by Ramanujan, that is, no sequence of the form p(An + B), in which
all of the partition numbers are even. Although my work fell short of proving
Subbaraos conjecture, I proved in the spring of 1994 a theorem that established
most of it. The Austrian mathematician Cristian-Silviu Radu would complete
my proof fifteen years later. My theorem attracted some attention, and it earned
me further invitations to lecture.
The academic year was now drawing to a close. Erika had graduated from
UCLA with a bachelors degree in nursing, and leaving California behind, she
joined me in Athens for the summer. It was wonderful to be together again after
a year living apart. Back then, the phone company was advertising its long-
distance service with the slogan reach out and touch someone. But long-distance
phone calls, as many as we had, couldnt replace our need for each other. I can
attest that reaching out and touching are better from up close. I have no idea how
Ramanujan managed without Janaki with him England. He must have felt very
lonely and isolated.
Erika and I enjoyed Andrews company and that of the other friends I had
made. It was a summer full of hot and muggy bike rides in the hills around
Athens, and evenings at the Globe enjoying pints of Bass ale. The summer of
1994 was a very sweet time for us.
Although I had hoped to stay at UGA for the 19941995 academic year, bud-
get constraints made that impossible, and I accepted an offer of a visiting assis-
tant professorship at the University of Illinois. It was very difficult leaving
Andrew and Georgia after only a year. Through Andrews wonderful mentoring,
I had been transformed into a professional mathematician. But I felt like a bird
being kicked out of the nest, and I had doubts whether I could remain aloft and
continue to produce results in a new environment without him nearby.
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Erika and I moved to Urbana, Illinois, in August 1994. I was delighted to work
alongside such fine mathematicians as Nigel Boston, who had arranged the posi-
tion for me; my friend Doug Bowman; and Bruce Berndt, the Ramanujan scholar
whom I had spectacularly failed to impress two years earlier in Missoula. Berndt
was devoting his career to resolving all of Ramanujans claims, and with my
newly found passion for Ramanujans mathematics, I was excited to work with
him and his graduate students. In fact, I had gradually formulated a plan to work
long-term with Berndt on Ramanujans mathematics.
Erika and I would spend only one year in Urbana. Erika found a job in the
oncology ward of the local hospital, while I spent the year doing mathematics,
teaching, and making some difficult academic choices. Although my work on
Subbaraos conjecture and my paper with Andrew on Brauers problem had
earned me a measure of notoriety, I had reached a scientific crossroads, a pivotal
moment. Shortly after arriving in Urbana, I realized that I had a choice to make.
As college students, future mathematicians are exposed to a wide variety of
mathematical subjects. As graduate students, they specialize in some of those
subjects in their coursework, and then in their dissertations, they make an origi-
nal contribution generally in a single specialized area. Early in a career, it is com-
mon to pursue questions that are closely related to the work that was done in the
dissertation. But at some point, that particular well runs dry or one finds oneself
left with questions that are too difficult. Or else ones interest simply turns else-
where. And of course, some research careers just peter out.
At Urbana, I encountered my own personal crossroads. I could work with
Berndt and his students, as I had originally planned, chipping away at the unre-
solved claims that abound in Ramanujans notebooks. For if Ramanujan was a
mathematical king, he had certainly left behind plenty of work for carters.
Indeed, Ramanujans writings seemed to offer a nearly endless supply of unproven
claims and identities to work on. But there was another path I might follow.
Following Kroneckers advice, I could choose to take a crack at being my own
ruler and assume responsibility for figuring out in what field of mathematics I
wished to pitch my tent. Berndt and I had not made any explicit plans for
research together, and so I felt no obligation one way or the other. It was like
choosing between a promotion to a secure position of responsibility in a large
firm or quitting and forming my own startup.
Ramanujans mathematics, as it is written in his notebooks and letters, pres-
ents a major challenge to contemporary mathematicians, who are trained to
build frameworks of theory. It is from those new theories that formulas, expres-
sions, and relationships flow. Some mathematicians build theories, while others,
the problem solvers, become expert technicians who masterfully apply those
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theories. There is a similar dichotomy in physics between the theoreticians and

the experimentalists. The challenge represented by Ramanujan is that there was
no theory of Ramanujan to apply to make sense out of his writings. And with-
out such a theory, mathematicians are left to supply proofs to an enormous col-
lection of disparate formulas and claims.
Berndt has chosen to work directly with Ramanujans writings, seeking mean-
ing in the complicated formulas and expressions one by one. The challenge has
been formidable, and together with his students, he had been successfully resolv-
ing those beautiful enigmas.
But Ramanujan had become much more to me over the years than the source
of enigmatic formulas, and so my view of him and his mathematics began to
seek a wider horizon. While studying Ramanujans claims for their own sake
would have been an interesting and important challenge, I had come to suspect
that many of those claims could be seen as enticing hints at theories that were
just begging to be discovered and developed. I believed that Ramanujans discov-
eries had come to him as fragments of a vision of something higher, and so dis-
covering those theories would ultimately give rise to new mathematics. I viewed
Ramanujans claims as gifts for intrepid mathematicians of the future, elusive
gifts that concealed their true reward, an offering to any mathematician able and
willing to plumb their deeper meaning.
I first began to suspect that there were such unexplored depths in Ramanujans
mathematics when I was working with Gordon at UCLA.Ramanujans strange
formulas had offered hints of the important theories that Deligne had devel-
oped. Indeed, Deligne was awarded the Fields Medal for proving overarching
conjectures in arithmetic geometry put forth by Serre and Weil. Those theories
that arose from Delignes work have created a framework that has defined a
massive part of mathematics for the last forty years. For example, without
Delignes work, we still wouldnt have a proof of Fermats last theorem. The con-
jectures Deligne proved were inspired by some of Ramanujans strange claims
for his tau function, claims that seemed insignificant when he first recorded
them a century ago.
Instead of working with Berndt, I began, with Nigel Bostons help, to investi-
gate areas of mathematics that although new to me, were known to involve mod-
ular forms, the objects I had studied in my dissertation. Instead of following the
path of least resistance, I chose to broaden my fields of expertise with the idea
that I was investing in my mathematical future. I worked to assemble the knowl-
edge and tools that I believed would be essential for my mathematical purpose:
to become one of the heirs to the rich legacy that Ramanujan had left to mathe-
maticians of the future, a legacy available to anyone with the talent, dedication,
178
and insight to seek out the theories implicit in Ramanujans bequest to the future:
the claims he recorded without proof in his letters and notebooks.
I had a strong sense that Ramanujans claim about partitions in his 1919 paper
in which he proved the stunning divisibility patterns for the primes 5, 7, and 11
was such a gift. He wrote, It appears that there are no equally simple proper-
ties involving primes other than these three. He didnt elaborate on what he
meant. Did Ramanujan know of other properties that were more complex? First
of all, if there had been other simple properties, Ramanujans genius would have
found them. And if he had discovered more complex properties, he surely would
have written them down. But this was Ramanujan, and there was another pos-
sibility: that he sensed the presence of other properties but couldnt see precisely
what they were. I read and reread that paper many times, and I almost came to
believe that those words were meant for me. In reading between the lines, I
became convinced that he had been aware of other, less simple, properties. He
was speaking to me, and he was beckoning to me to find them.
I now had new voices in my head, and they were the words Ramanujan had
left for me and mathematicians like me. They were the clues he had left behind
for us. Ramanujan was telling me that what he had seen in his visions was a frag-
ment of something larger. My mathematical search for Ramanujan now became
a search for an encompassing theory.
That year in Urbana, I wrote further papers in arithmetic geometry and rep-
resentation theory, subjects that at first glance have nothing to do with
Ramanujans mathematics. I was beginning to develop my view of the implica-
tions of Ramanujans mathematics, which I would later write about in a book I
called The Web of Modularity. The functions I had studied in my dissertation, the
so-called modular forms, seemed to appear in so many different areas, forming a
web of interconnected subjects, that they must have a deep mathematical signifi-
cance. Thus it was that during my year in Urbana, I developed a personal rela-
tionship to Ramanujans mathematics, and the work I did in recognizing the
many implications and roles for those functions, constructing the web of modu-
larity, has driven and sustained my careera mathematical search for
Ramanujan.
In November, out of the blue, I received a letter from the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton. Nothing about the envelope suggested that the letter inside
would be important. It was an ordinary white office envelope with Institute for
Advanced Study as the return address. It could have been an announcement of
the seminar schedule for all I knew. But it was much more than that. I was like
the boy Charlie from Roald Dahls childrens book Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory when he tore the wrapper off his Wonka bar to discover the last of five
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golden tickets, offering a tour of the magical factory and a lifetime supply of
chocolate. Instead of all the chocolate I could ever want, I had been given an
even sweeter prize. The letter was from the renowned number theorist and Fields
medalist Enrico Bombieri. It consisted of a single paragraph offering me a two-
year membership at the Institute.
Andrew Granville had recommended me to Bombieri, praising my goal of
searching for Ramanujans number theory, and Bombieri had apparently found
my goal worthy of support. I had only one dutyto pursue my search for
Ramanujan. The letter was a dream come true. I would have the privilege of
working at an institution made famous by the likes of Einstein, Dyson, Gdel,
Oppenheimer, and Weil, among many other luminaries.
And of course, the Institute had played a special role in my family history.
Andr Weil, who had discovered my father in Japan forty years earlier, was a
longtime faculty member. Over the years, he had arranged several visiting posi-
tions for my father, including the 19681969 academic year, the year I was born.
My mother would take long walks on the Institute campus, pushing me in a car-
riage. Erika and I would have our first child, Aspen, at the Institute in 1996, and
history would almost repeat itself: instead of long walks pushing a carriage,
Erika and I would glide around the grounds on roller blades with Aspen strapped
safely in a pink baby jogger.
Thanks to the strong support of my mentors Sally, Gordon, and Granville, I
had somehow reached a level beyond my wildest dreams. I had dropped out of
high school ten years earlier, and four years later, my complex analysis professor
at UChicago had tried to talk me out of pursuing a doctorate. Now I was pursu-
ing my own research program at the Institute for Advanced Study. And woven
through all that history was my faithful guide Ramanujan.
My decision to search for Ramanujan the mathematician would mean going
a bit more distance out of my way. I wanted to increase my knowledge, and that
would slow down my publication rate, something that anyone trying to land a
permanent job must take into account. The Institutes offer was therefore a god-
send. I could concentrate on my mathematics in an environment free of other
distractions and responsibilities; I had access to world-class libraries at the
Institute and Princeton University, and I would be able to learn from some of the
worlds most brilliant and talented mathematicians. I vowed to make the most of
this special opportunity.
Erika and I moved to Princeton in August 1995, my third consecutive August
move. We lived in a two-bedroom Bauhaus apartment at 69 Einstein Drive.
Erika found work as a nurse in Trenton, and I did my number theory research.
180
My first task was to complete my web of modularity. After that initial invest-
ment, I would then turn to my search for Ramanujans mathematics.
The 19951996 academic year at the Institute was devoted to an examination
of the proof of Fermats last theorem. Although it turned out that the original
proof by Wiles had a flaw, he was able to correct it in a supplementary paper
written with his former graduate student Richard Taylor. Due to the importance
of their work, the Institute had invited many of the worlds leading number theo-
rists to spend the year in a collaborative environment in which they could push
number theory even further. It was an awesome year, one that would contribute
to my growth as a mathematician and help my career in many ways. With so
many experts to talk to, I was able to complete the bulk of the work for my web
of modularity in good order.
We made many friends that year, mostly other young mathematicians. Two of
our closest friends were Princeton graduate students Kannan Sound
Soundararajan and Chris Skinner. Sound would later become a professor at
Stanford, and Chris would become a professor at Princeton. We were fans of the
TV show X-files, and we made frequent trips to nearby Iselin, New Jersey, for
Indian food. Chowpatty was our favorite restaurant, and that is where I devel-
oped a taste for south Indian vegetarian dishes like pav bhaji and masala dosa.
My enthusiasm for cycling rubbed off on Chris and Sound. I helped them
shop for mountain bikes, and we rode often on the trails in the area, even after
one of us flipped over the handlebars on a narrow and rocky descent and landed
in the emergency room. When our daughter Aspen was born in June 1996, Chris
and Sound became her first uncles.
I wrote papers with Chris and Sound during my Princeton years. Chris and I
would ultimately write three papers on mathematics related to the Birch
Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, one of the notorious Millennium Problems
whose solution would bring a million-dollar prize. This was part of filling in my
web, the groundwork I felt was necessary before I could begin my search for
Ramanujans mathematics in earnest.
When I wasnt thinking about that problem, Ramanujans words were on my
mind, as if he were somehow speaking to me. In addition to his comments about
the absence of further simple properties for the partition numbers, I was
deeply interested in a 1916 paper on quadratic forms in which similar puzzling
words appeared, this time about the absence of a simple law. Sound and I
became enamored with the problem implied by Ramanujans words. We had to
figure out what he meant.
In some ways, Sound is a modern-day Ramanujan. Born to Brahmin parents
in Chennai (Madras), he discovered mathematics as a young boy. He was a prod-
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igy, and he came to the West seeking to make a name for himself. As a high-
school student in 1989, when I was racing my bike against people like Greg
Lemond and Eric Heiden for Pepsi-Miyata, he attended the Research Science
Institute at MIT, arguably the most renowned summer science research program
for high-school students. There he began to hone his skills in analytic number
theory. In 1991, he won a silver medal representing India at the International
Mathematical Olympiad in Sweden. He attended college at the University of
Michigan, where he wrote an honors thesis that earned him the prestigious
Morgan Prize for undergraduate research in mathematics.
Sound and I wanted to figure out what Ramanujan had meant by the absence
of a simple law for his quadratic form. Quadratic forms are objects that math-
ematicians have studied for centuries. One of the most famous theorems about
them is due to the eighteenth-century mathematician Joseph Lagrange. He
proved that every positive integerno exceptions!can be expressed as the sum
of four perfect squares. Its like a magic trick: Pick a number, any number. How
about 374? Then I can pull four integers out of my hat such that their squares add
up to 374. For example, 374 = 02 + 22 + 92 + 172 . I could also have written
374 = 6 2 + 72 + 82 + 152 (as you can see, there is nothing necessarily unique about
such representations). Lagrange proved that there is nothing special about 374.
You can find a similar representation for every positive integer.
Now in solving a mathematical problem, it is crucial to ask the question in a
way that leads to a solution. So instead of asking whether every positive integer
can be written as a sum of four squares, Lagrange considered the quadratic form
a 2 + b 2 + c 2 + d 2 and proved that by plugging in all possible integer combinations
for a, b, c, d into that quadratic form, you obtain all of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, .
In the 1916 paper that had intrigued Sound and me, Ramanujan was consid-
ering the quadratic form x 2 + y 2 + 10 z 2 , in relation to which he wrote, the odd
numbers that are not of the form x 2 + y 2 + 10 z 2 , viz., 3, 7, 23, 31, 33, 43, 67, 79,
87, 133, 217, 219, 223, 253, 307, 391 do not seem to obey a simple law.
Whereas Lagranges quadratic form could represent every positive integer, there
are numbers that cannot be written in the form x 2 + y 2 + 10 z 2 (the reader can
easily verify that the numbers in Ramanujans list above cannot be thus
represented).
There are plenty of odd numbers that can be obtained by this quadratic form,
such as 57 = 12 + 4 2 + 10 22 , where we have chosen x=1, y=4, and z=2. There
seemed to Ramanujan to be no simple law that would explain his list and show
how it continues. What did he mean that there doesnt appear to be a simple law?
In 1990, Bill Duke and Rainer Schulze-Pillot proved a fantastic theorem that
implied that all odd numbers from some point on must be represented in this
182
way. That meant that Ramanujans list petered out eventually, since the number
of odd integers that cannot be represented by the quadratic form in question is
finite. You could say, then, that Ramanujan was right: there was no simple law.
Indeed, you could say that there was no law at all! It was just a finite list of the
relatively few (however many it might be, a finite number is small compared to
infinity) integers that happened not to have such a representation. On the other
hand, for us, the law that we had to find was this: what is the last number on the
list? And was finding it going to be simple, or was it going to be hard?
Sound and I ran a computer program, and we found that Ramanujans list
could be extended by the odd numbers 679 and 2719. But after that, the well ran
dry. For every larger odd number we triedand we tried all the way up to the
super-huge number 1,000,000,000,000,000we found that it could be expressed
by the quadratic form using some choice of x, y, and z. We concluded that we had
found the from some point on from Duke and Schulze-Pillots theorem. That
was the simple law. It must be true that every odd number larger than 2719 can
be expressed by Ramanujans quadratic form, and we set out to prove it. Although
we firmly believed that we were right, we couldnt come up with a proof, no mat-
ter how hard we tried. When mathematicians are unable to prove something
that they believe to be true, they sometimes are able to give a proof on the
assumption that some unproven conjecture is true. In our case, we were able to
prove that 2719 is the last number in the sequence on the assumption of the
truth of the generalized Riemann hypothesis.
The ordinary Riemann hypothesis is one of the most important open prob-
lems in mathematics. It involves a certain conjectured property of a certain
function of a complex variable. Its truth would resolve many unanswered ques-
tions. For example, mathematicians would have a much clearer understanding
of prime numbers if the Riemann hypothesis were confirmed to be true. The
generalized Riemann hypothesis is a natural generalization of the Riemann
hypothesis.
Using a long and complicated argument, we finally found a way to show that
the truth of the generalized Riemann hypothesis implies that every odd number
greater than 2719 can be written as x 2 + y 2 + 10 z 2 for some integers x, y, and z.
The fact that almost every mathematician believes in the truth of the generalized
Riemann hypothesis and the fact that every odd number greater than 2719 up to
a very large number can be represented by Ramanujans quadratic form con-
vinced us that we had found the law. But although the law is simple enough to
state, it thus far defies a definitive proof. To be sure, if someone manages to prove
the generalized Riemann hypothesis, then our conditional proof will at once
become a genuine proof. But the generalized Riemann hypothesis is arguably
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one of the most difficult open problems in mathematics. So Ramanujan was

right that the odd numbers do not obey a simple law, in the sense that they are
constrained by one of the most difficult unsolved problems in mathematics.
I had no idea that I would see the number 2719 again ten years later, etched on a
wall in the very spot where Ramanujan performed some of his first calculations.
Thanks to my two years in Princeton, I was able to complete a large body of
work, and I was rewarded for my efforts with a tenure-track assistant professor-
ship at Penn State University. George Andrews, one of the mathematicians I
admired from the BBC documentary and Robert Kanigels book The Man Who
Knew Infinity, had recommended me for the position. My work on Ramanujans
mathematics, namely my work on Subbaraos conjecture for the partition
numbers and my work with Sound on Ramanujans quadratic form, were the
reasons for my success.
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Chapter 31

BITTERSWEET REUNION
Princeton, New Jersey (1997)
S
hortly before we moved to Penn State, my parents made the drive from
Baltimore, where my father was still teaching at Johns Hopkins, for a
weekend visit. I had arranged for them to be reunited with Andr Weil,
who was now ninety-one. My parents had not seen Weil since the 1970s, and
they didnt know what to expect. They were nervous. However, the reunion was
important to them. They needed to thank him for his generosity, for having
made their lives possible.
Watching my parents walk the grounds of the Institute and hearing them
retell the story of how Andr Weil rescued them as a young starving Japanese
couple in 1955 was profoundly moving. Weil had invited my father to the
Institute, and the hallowed grounds now represented the beginning of every-
thing that was good in their lives. They excitedly pointed out where they used to
go for walks, and they jokingly pointed out the Tamagawa tree, a tree on
Einstein Drive that Tsuneo Tamagawa, their friend and future Yale professor,
had rammed with his car while learning to parallel park.
Sitting in the Institutes Fuld Hall waiting for Weil to arrive, my father talked
about the TokyoNikko conference. I knew only a small part of the story, the bits
that most professional number theorists know. But there was more that my
father wanted to tell me.
At that conference, Weil gave an impromptu after-dinner talk that wasnt part
of the official program. He wanted to inspire the young Japanese mathematicians
by telling a story that had inspired him when he had been uncertain of his future
in mathematics.

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C H A P T E R 31
Weil had a fascinating life, in a way reflecting that of my father. Although he

was born into a prominent Alsatian Jewish family and grew up in privilege in
Paris, he had struggled early in his career.
As a young mathematician, Weil traveled to India and soaked up the cul-
turenot many Western mathematicians were doing that in the early twenti-
eth centuryand throughout his life, he was influenced by Hindu thought.
Weil was traveling in Scandinavia in 1939 and was in Finland when war broke
out between Finland and Russia. He was mistakenly arrested by the Finns for
spying. He was soon released, but on his return to France, he was arrested for
failing to report for military duty, and he spent time in prison. In 1941, he
managed to sail with his family from Marseille to NewYork, and for several
years he was a mathematical nomad, struggling in his own kind of purgatory
for a mathematician of his stature.
Weil was saddled with a heavy teaching load at Lehigh University for two
years, followed by two years in a low-paying position at the Universidade de So
Paulo, in Brazil. His troubles were somewhat reminiscent of Ramanujans own
struggles. Finally, the importance of his work was fully recognized, and he was
suitably rewarded with a faculty position at UChicago in 1947.
Inspired by the purpose of the symposiumthe promotion of reconciliation
and world peace in the name of scienceWeil felt the need to tell a story that
had inspired him when he needed hope. Dressed in a white shirt and light khaki
pants, Weil addressed the Japanese mathematicians, almost all in dress shirts,
neckties, and dark suits, politely sitting in formation at tables behind cardboard
rectangles bearing their names.
He spoke about a most enigmatic man, an untrained college dropout from
faraway India, who had overcome unbelievable obstacles forty years earlier to
startle a few of the worlds leading mathematicians with his creativity and imagi-
nation before his untimely death at the age of thirty-two. The young Japanese
men had never heard of that man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, but by the end of the
evening, they had all embraced a new hero. Ramanujan had inspired Weil, and
that night, he inspired those young Japanese mathematicians, hungry in body
and spirit, who needed hope and inspiration.
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BI T T E R S W E E T R EU N ION
Andr Weil lecturing at the 1955 TokyoNikko conference
Oh my God, it all made sense now!

It was no wonder that my father had been so overcome by Janakis letter,
though it was little more than a form letter that she had sent to dozens of math-
ematicians. I now understood that on that fateful day in 1984, Janakis letter had
revived within my father memories of his own lifes pivotal moment. Ramanujan
had been an inspiration to him, a mathematical hero who embodied everything
admirable in an enquiring mind pitted against hardship. And he had learned
about Ramanujan at the conference where he himself had been discovered by
the great Andr Weil, setting in motion everything that had been good in his life.
Janakis letter had carried my father to that moment in 1955 when it was revealed
that all his efforts had not been in vain, that he, too, counted.
The clouds parted; the sky was suffused with light; somewhere, an angelic
choir was singing; the voices in my head fell silent. I saw before me my destiny
and purpose. I was to be the next link in the chain. I was to lead a life that mir-
rored my fathers path. We had both earned positions at the Institute after over-
coming formidable challenges. And it turned out that we had both benefited
from strong mentors who helped pave our way. Had it not been for Weils
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C H A P T E R 31
generosity, what would have become of my parents? Had it not been for the
strong support of men like Sally, Gordon, and Granville, and had it not been for
Ramanujan and the Ramanujan miracles that seemed to occur when I needed
them most, what would have become of me?
When I offered the example of Ramanujan in a last-ditch effort to convince
my parents to let me drop out of high school, I did so because I was grasping at
straws. But in uttering the Open Sesame of Ramanujans name, I unwittingly did
much more than secure my freedom. I offered my father a glimpse of the next
chapter in an infinite story that continues to evoke awe and wonder.
Janakis letter had reminded him that not all paths can be safely laid out in
advance. And that recollection allowed him to see me in a different light. Perhaps
I could find my own way toward living the life that was meant for me, a life that
made good use of my talents. It was that glimpse of possibility that convinced
him to let me go. The enigmatic Ramanujan had helped make my father, and
because of that, he was somehow helping to make something of me.
The end to the weekend was bittersweet. The ninety-one-year-old Weil finally
arrived. Although he had long since retired, he still spent much of his time at the
Institute, sitting alone in a comfortable chair in the tea room of Fuld Hall. He
rarely spoke to Institute members. He kept to himself, and he seemed perfectly
content in doing so.
Weil was now nearly deaf and blind. He was unable to focus his gaze in the
direction of my parents as they addressed him. It was clear to me that Weil
remembered my parents, and I am certain he understood something of what
they were saying. However, all he could muster in return, in a soft melancholy
voice, were the words, I am so sorry Ono. I cannot hear nor see you. And that
is how it ended.
In tears at the sight of this once powerful man, they left Weil alone in his com-
fortable chair, staring off into space. The man who had been instrumental in
virtually everything important in our lives, who had been a towering figure in
twentieth-century mathematics, had been reduced by age and infirmity to a
mere shadow of his former self. Weil would pass away within the year.
That weekend was the first time that I was able to offer my parents convincing
evidence that I had achieved a level of success of nonzero measure. I had become
an adult in their eyes and was no longer disparaged as a high-school dropout
and unmotivated college student. It didnt matter that I had quit the violin, nor
that my complex-analysis professor felt that I had insufficient talent. It was of no
importance that I had almost failed my algebra qualifying exam. That my first
two hundred job applications had resulted in zero interviews was a thing of the
past. Those events, which had been delicious nourishment for the negative
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BI T T E R S W E E T R EU N ION
voices in my head, had lost their hold. I was hosting my parents as a member of
the Institute for Advanced Study, Einsteins institute in the woods. I had recon-
nected them with Weil, allowing them to recall all the contingencies of their own
journey from war-torn Japan to the Baltimore suburbs.
That weekend marked a turning point in my relationship with my parents.
They now understood that I was developing a strong reputation as a mathemati-
cian. They also enjoyed their role as grandparents to Aspen, even pushing her
around the Institute grounds in a stroller, reliving the days thirty years earlier
when I was the one being pushed. As if a wicked sorcerers spell had been lifted,
my parents stopped worrying about me. It was a huge relief to me to realize that
I had achieved a measure of professional success in their eyes. They stopped
voicing their disapproval of me, no longer harping on my perceived inadequa-
cies and failures.
Since that moment, they havent missed holidays, birthdays, and anniversa-
riesall the celebrations that were absent in my previous life. I can now count
on my mother to send cards for each of those occasions, just as I could count on
her setting out my breakfast all those years ago. Years later, when they are
seventy-eight and eighty-six, my parents will even travel to Atlanta to celebrate
Aspens high-school graduation.
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Chapter 32

I COUNT NOW
State College andWashington, D.C. (19972000)
A
spen, Erika, and I moved to State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn
State, in July 1997. To celebrate my appointment, George Andrews and
I organized the conference Topics in Number Theory in Honor of
Basil Gordon and Sarvadaman Chowla. The meeting was held from July 31 to
August 3 at the Penn State Hotel. George and I wanted to honor the memory of
Chowla, a longtime member of the Penn State faculty who had passed away in
1995, and we wanted to celebrate Gordons sixty-fifth birthday.
It was a glorious meeting. Over 170 number theorists from all over the world
attended the conference and joined our celebration. We heard about cutting-
edge research from such stars as Henri Darmon (Princeton), Richard Stanley
(MIT), and Trevor Wooley (University of Michigan), in addition to my friends
Andrew Granville, Carl Pomerance, Chris Skinner, and Kannan (Sound)
Soundararajan.
I couldnt think of a better way to celebrate Gordons birthday than to offer
him this conference in his honor. Gordon had taught me how to love math for
maths sake. He had offered me strength when I was at my lowest point.
I had prepared a moving speech for the conference banquet in which I would
thank Gordon for everything he had done for meshowing me how to see
beauty in mathematics, helping me to overcome my insecurities, and believing
in me when I didnt believe in myself. I wanted him to understand how impor-
tant he had been in my life. I spent days working on that speech, discarding
perhaps a dozen drafts. I agonized over the words. I had to get it right. Finally, I
pared away all the high-sounding periphrasis and circumlocution and wrote a
simple three-minute talk straight from my heart.

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C H A P T E R 32
It was the night of the banquet. When it was my turn to speak, I walked to the
podium and unfolded the paper on which my speech was written. Standing
before family, friends, and 170 fellow number theorists, I broke down and cried.
I tried to find the strength to read my speech, but I was so overwhelmed by the
emotions stirred up at the sight of its first words that I couldnt even begin. When
it became apparent that I was not going to regain my self-possession, that I was
going to continue to stand there, choked up, unable to utter a word, Gordon
walked up to the podium and embraced me. He didnt need to hear my words.
He knew, and everyone knew. I might have saved myself the trouble of writing a
speech and simply borrowed that overused phrase, Words cannot describe
what Basil Gordon means to me. I am crying as I write this.
I handed the folded paper to Gordon. It began with the words, I thank Basil
Gordon for saving my life.
Basil Gordon passed away in 2012 after a long, happy, and fulfilled life. I was
honored that his family asked me to speak at his memorial service. This time, in
front of his family and former UCLA colleagues, I fought through tears, tears
shared by everyone there, and I finally delivered my speech. I miss him deeply,
and I thank God for sending me Basil Gordon.
Shortly after the conference, I received an exciting offer from Bruce Berndt.
Aware of my plan to search for Ramanujan the mathematician, with the idea of
seeking the theories of which his claims offered enticing glimpses, Berndt asked
me to help him edit one of Ramanujans unpublished manuscripts. The manu-
script in question was an extensive collection of notes on Ramanujans tau-
function and Eulers partition numbers. We planned to publish a paper under
Ramanujans name, to which we would add commentary for interested readers.
I had already planned to study Ramanujans writings, looking for the clues
that I felt had been placed there for me to discover. The proposed project with
Berndt offered the perfect opportunity, and it involved one of Ramanujans
unpublished manuscripts.
Most of these unpublished notes involved ad hoc calculations with modular
forms, and so Bruce thought of me as a natural candidate to help him with the
task. I could provide a modern perspective, one based on the ideas of Deligne,
Serre, and Swinnerton-Dyer. I had no idea that Bruces request would lead to
insights that would give an enormous boost to my career.
It was exciting to read Ramanujans unpublished notes. His 1919 observation,
It appears that there are no equally simple properties involving primes other
than these three, had been haunting me for two years. The simple properties
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I C OU N T NOW
to which Ramanujan referred were his partition number patterns for the primes
5, 7, and 11. Did he know of properties for other primes? If so, were the patterns
complicated? Apart from my work on Subbaraos conjecture, which concerned
even and odd partition numbers, and work of A.O.L.Atkin from the 1960s, vir-
tually nothing was known about these questions. It was from reading Ramanujans
unpublished manuscript that I began finally to see what Ramanujan probably
had in mind.
My Penn State office was on the top floor of the McAllister Building, a former
womens dormitory that was apparently no longer fit to house undergraduates
but was considered good enough for mathematicians. Built in 1904, the building
was in desperate shape. I could hear squirrels rummaging in the attic above my
office. The Internet went out several times during my first year: it seems that
squirrels like the taste, or at least the mouthfeel, of cables. I had a window whose
lock had been torn off years earlier. Fortunately, there was no way of opening it,
since it was permanently sealed shut with layer upon layer of heavy white paint.
I furnished my office at Penn State Salvage, a warehouse of castaway odds and
ends scavenged from the dorms. I bought a stained freakish orange sofa for $20,
and I placed it under the low ceiling that followed the gabled roofline of the
building. It was on that sofa that I did much of my best work at Penn State, and
it was there that I came across a few formulas related to partition numbers in
Ramanujans unpublished manuscript that made no sense. I had been thinking
about partition numbers for three years, and I became convinced in looking at
his formulas that Ramanujan must have made some errors in his calculations.
But I was unable to pinpoint them. I then decided that I was probably misunder-
standing what he meant, which is common for anyone reading Ramanujans
writings. I didnt even see how to compute his expressions. His formulas simply
looked too strange to be true.
I had been pondering those bewildering expressions for an hour when a glo-
rious insight came to me as if handed down from on high. It was one of those
inexplicable moments of clarity that come in a flash when one is in a deep medi-
tative state. It was one of those moments when the clear outline of a solution
emerges from the fog.
I excitedly jumped to my feet, banging my forehead so hard on the sloping
ceiling that I sent the squirrels in the attic scurrying. I was stunned by the blow,
but my mind was clear: I understood what Ramanujan meant by his expressions,
and I knew how to compute them. Ramanujan had found a way to relate the
partition numbers to special functions I already knew well. It was time to do
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C H A P T E R 32
some calculations. I went to my computer and wrote a little program to evaluate

one of the formulas. The computer spit out the terms one by one, and the results
showed that the partition numbers were in perfect harmony with the values of
the special function. Ramanujan was right, and I had figured out his secret.
I ran out of my office wanting to hoot and holler in sheer joy. But I thought
better of that and ran to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face to
make sure I wasnt dreaming. I was so excited that I drenched my shirt, which I
then took off. At that moment, in walked Dale Brownawell, a fellow number
theorist, to find me shirtless, wet, and sporting a huge bump on my forehead.
Understandably shocked by the sight of me, he said, What in the world hap-
pened to you? I didnt want to have to explain my eureka moment on the sofa,
since there was still work to be done before I would have anything to say to any-
one, and so I simply said that I had hit my head on the coat hook in the bath-
room stall. I was not very convincing and probably gave Dale cause for
unnecessary speculation.
I spent the next weekend pondering Ramanujans strange formulas, now
with the firm belief that they had to be correct, because if they were not true,
no one would have had the imagination to invent them, as Hardy said after
receiving his first letter from Ramanujan. After trying a variety of tricks from
the theory of modular forms, I was finally able to devise a procedure that pro-
duced Ramanujans formulas and thereby proved his claims. From those puz-
zling claims, which Ramanujan had offered without proof in his strange
unpublished manuscript, I assembled a theory, which I was immediately able to
put to good use.
By combining my new results with work of Deligne and Serre and results of
Shimura, one of the stars among the young Japanese mathematicians at the 1955
TokyoNikko conference, I was finally able to make sense of Ramanujans enig-
matic quotation. I proved that the partition numbers have patterns for virtually
every prime. For primes larger than 11, however, those patterns turn out to be
monstrosities. For instance, the number of ways of partitioning
4,063,467,631n + 30,064,597, no matter what you choose for n, is always a mul-
tiple of 31. I proved that there are infinitely many such patterns for every prime
other than 2 and 3.
Ramanujan was right about there being no simple properties for primes larger
than 11, and I am certain that his unpublished formulas were the first steps in his
effort to prove the complex properties that he knew must be out there. Moreover,
I firmly believe that he expected that he would eventually find the necessary
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I C OU N T NOW
tools for proving them. He never succeeded. That I was able to succeed where he
had failed is because I had at my disposal the powerful mathematical machinery
assembled fifty years after Ramanujans death by Deligne, Serre, and Shimura.
When I proved my theorem, I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
My paper proving this theorem appeared in the Annals of Mathematics, the
same journal that had published the proof of Fermats last theorem just a few
years earlier. My result made world news, and I was rewarded for figuring out
Ramanujans enigma with fellowships from the Alfred P.Sloan Foundation and
the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. I was also one of sixty young scien-
tists and engineers to be honored by President Bill Clinton with a Presidential
Early Career Award. My parents attended the ceremony at the White House, and
I was proud to have them there.
That evening, after the White House ceremony, my father bestowed on me the
magical letter that Ramanujans widow had sent him in 1984, the one that had
come to symbolize my path from high-school dropout to professional mathema-
tician. He said,
Ken-chan. Ramanujans widow sent it to me for the little part I played in

honoring his memory. Your work, that is the genuine gift. There is no better
way to honor Ramanujan, and my son, you were the one to do it. I was
merely meant to be a temporary keeper of the letter, and now I pass it on to
you, its rightful owner. I am so proud of you.
I finally heard the words I had so desperately craved my entire life. That evening,
I cried tears of joy under a steaming hot shower, realizing that I had finally achieved
my impossible dream. At that moment, many of the voices in my head vanished. I
have never heard from them again. Although I still have some voices, they are of
the sort that everyone has. The voices that had once nearly driven me mad disap-
peared that day a few blocks from the White House. As fate would have it, I was
thirty-two years old, the age at which Ramanujan, the gift from Kumbakonam,
passed away, leaving behind writings that have been speaking to me.
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In front of the White House

before my Presidential Early
Career Award ceremony
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Chapter 33

THE IDEA OFRAMANUJAN
H
ow have I been lucky enough to get to where I am today?
The story of Ramanujan has inspired generations of mathematicians.
It inspired Weil. It inspired my father as an uncertain mathematician in
postwar Japan, and in turn it inspired me as a troubled teenager in the 1980s.
My search for Ramanujan shall go on. I shall continue to search for Ramanujan
the mathematician. Perhaps more importantly, I shall continue to promote the
idea of Ramanujanthat greatness is often found in unusual and unpromising
circumstances, and it must be recognized and nurtured. Indeed, had it not been
for the goodwill of Ramanujans friends and parents, and people like G.H.Hardy,
Andr Weil, Paul Sally, Basil Gordon, Andrew Granville, Bruce Berndt, George
Andrews, and countless others, I wouldnt have had anything to write about.
Ramanujan, my father, and Iwe three would have never happened.
I will continue mentoring bright math students, the future Ramanujans,
through my annual summer undergraduate research programs, my training of
PhD students, and my mentoring of postdoctoral students. What is interesting
about many of the students that I have mentored, like the prodigies Jayce Getz,
Daniel Kane, Eric Larson, Hannah Larson, Alison Miller, Maria Monks, Evan
ODorney, Aaron Pixton, among others too many to mention, is that they have
often come from nontraditional or unpromising circumstances. What unites
them is that they have been drawn by the beauty of mathematics. I owe it to them
and my mentors, and I owe it to Ramanujan, to do my part. Searching for
Ramanujan is my calling; it is my lifes purpose.
How was I lucky enough to get to where I am today? That is the question that
opened this book. The preceding pages prove that the answer is multidimen-
sional, and the many steps in the proof amazingly trace my search for Ramanujan.
I benefited from the tough love of my parents. They fostered qualities in me that

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have been essential to my success. I am ambitious and competitive. I am restless,

anxious to take on the next challenge.
But I also emerged as a fragile adolescent with low self-esteem. I needed nur-
turing from many people along the way to reach my happy place, and for some
inexplicable reason, Ramanujan was there with me every step of the way.
I recently gave a TEDx talk that I called How to live mathematically, but not
by the numbers. As the product of tough-loving Japanese-American parents,
and as a professor at Emory who has present-day tiger children in class, I felt the
strong need to offer advice.
Let me offer this advice here.
How will you choose to live your life?
That is the question I posed in my TEDx talk. It is the most important math
problem that most people are ever asked to solve. It is a question that researchers
have studied, and some have even offered mathematical formulas as solutions.
To keep it simple, I maintain that many people today are living mathemati-
cally: they live by the numbers. Many high-school students, college students,
and their parents will know exactly what I mean. Kids today are frantically living
their lives in pursuit of numbers such as high grade-point averages, strong ACT
and SAT test scores, a large number of Advanced Placement courses and tests,
admission to a top-ranked college, and so on. Many parents, and society as a
whole, emphasize the importance of these numbers with the idea that strong
numbers lead to success, and success leads to happy and fulfilled lives.
Yet such a frantic high-stakes pursuit has its risks.
But despite those risks, does the frantic pursuit of credentials work? How do
we measure happiness and fulfillment? It is natural to ask those who are facing
death. Well-known studies have determined the top deathbed regrets, and their
findings are thought-provoking. These are the top five deathbed regrets from
Bronnie Wares book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying:
1. I wish I had had the courage to live a life that was true to myself, not the life
others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadnt worked so hard.
3. I wish I had had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happier.
These regrets speak to me. It turns out that many of the choices I made in my
life have warded off the possibility of such regrets.
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T H E I DE A OFR A M A N U JA N
I struggled to live my own life. I found strength in my decision to quit the

violin, and I found freedom in my bicycle racing. I strongly believe that both of
those choices helped me find the courage to live a life that was true to myself.
My choices were made in the pursuit of happiness, and it was my ability to
express my feelings with conviction that allowed me to make those choices.
I was a goofball in college. I was an unmotivated student who was worried
about living up to parental expectations as a math major at UChicago. Although
I ended up becoming a mathematician, I did not work on math full throttle, liv-
ing the life that my parents expected of me. As a result, I did not come to resent
mathematics, and I was able to remain open to the idea of pursuing mathematics
for its own sake when Gordon taught me how to appreciate its intrinsic beauty.
Of course, thanks to that choice, I ended up enjoying many rich collegiate
experiences that I would otherwise have missed out on. They were choices made
in the pursuit of happiness.
Among the top five deathbed regrets, in case anyone is keeping score, the only
one I havent checked off is number 4: I wish I had stayed in touch with my
friends. Writing this book has been a cathartic experience. I have fondly recalled
some joyous times while struggling to find the words and courage to reveal my
darkest moments. Many of these darkest moments were new to Erika, who has
been closer to me than anyone. It is my hope that with this book, I will be able to
reconnect with some of my friends from the black hole of my former life.
Friends, I apologize for abandoning you. It is my sincere hope that you will
understand from this book why I had to leave you behind for a time. I went a
very long distance out of my way to block out the period of my life in which
you were present, and I am ready now to come back the short distance that
separates us.
Let me end with the advice that I offered in my TEDx talk. I espoused the idea
of living mathematically, but not by the numbers as an approach to life that
highlights the skills that are important for solving math problems, but applied to
everyday life. There are four qualities that I think we should try to enhance in
ourselves: creativity, flexibility, confidence and determination, and rigor. Let me
explain.
1. Creative people find ways to handle lifes challenges. I believe that curious and
creative people tend to be happier people. Their open minds allow them to
appreciate the worlds infinite complexity.
2. Flexible people are able to approach problems from different points of view.
Flexible people are equipped to meet and work with people from different
backgrounds and cultures.
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C H A P T E R 33
3. Confident and determined people have the courage and strength to manipu-
late difficult ideas. They have the confidence to attack challenges even when a
solution is not obvious.
4. Rigorous people pay attention to details, and they are more likely to find
opportunities in unexpected places.
Live mathematically, but not by the numbers.
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Chapter 34

MY SPIRITUALITY
I
am often asked whether I believe that Ramanujans findings truly came to
him as visions from a goddess. I didnt believe this for most of my life.
Perhaps if I were a Hindu, I would have had an easier time subscribing to
such a view. Instead, I wish to offer my opinion on a simpler question: was
Ramanujans mathematics divine in origin?
I have read most of Ramanujans papers multiple times. I have read virtually
everything ever written about him, and I have read and reread his letters and
notebooks many times. I have tried to develop some sense of what he was like,
and what motivated his thinking. The deeper I dig, the more in awe I am of
Ramanujan. Because of my growing sense of wonder, I have thought quite a bit
about the source of Ramanujans ideas.
Earlier, I was convinced that his claim of visions from a goddess was poppy-
cock. But now I have changed my mind. His claims and formulas, as intimidat-
ing as they are at first glance, are awe-inspiring in their beauty and rightness. The
more I read Ramanujans work, the greater are the depths that are revealed. How
was it possible for an untrained youth ignorant of modern mathematics to pro-
duce those wonderful formulas? Reading Ramanujans writings has become a
spiritual experience for me. I sense in his revelations to me a divine source of
revelation to him.
I now firmly believe that Ramanujans ideas are divine in origin, though I am
much less sure just what I mean when I use the word divine. I am not saying
that Ramanujan had a direct line to God, whatever that might mean. Instead,
I share Carl Sagans view that science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and
awe The cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts
science into something that is surely spiritual. From this point of view,
I believe that all science is spiritual. Francis Collins, director of the National
Institutes of Health and the former leader of the project that mapped the human

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genome, is a strong advocate of this view, and he is well known for having said
that The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshiped
in the cathedral or the laboratory.
So I leave aside the question of the nature of God. Our knowledge of the
divine can be obscure at best. As Saint Paul tells us, now we see through a glass,
darkly. But like Carl Sagan, like Francis Collins, like Alfred Tennyson in his
Higher Pantheism that was quoted earlier in this book, I see evidence of the
divine everywhere. And while some may find it in the cosmos, or the genome, or
the seas, the hills, and the plains, I have seen it most vividly in the work of
Ramanujan. It doesnt matter whether Ramanujan believed in the literal exis-
tence of the goddess Namagiri or whether he saw in her merely the form that
divine inspiration took in his sleeping mind. A version of Namagiri that Western
readers may find more accessible can be found in Coleridges poem about Kubla
Khan and his famous pleasure dome, in which the lyric voice records a vision,
not of a goddess but of a damsel with a dulcimer, and tells us that a creative
persons task is to convert such visions into poetry, or art, or mathematics:
Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And such a person is indeed divinely blessed:
For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.
My search for Ramanujan has transformed me. Raised with no religion, I

found the strong need to come to terms with the sense of awe elicited by
Ramanujans formulas, and more generally the beautiful infinite complexity of
the universe. Thanks to this awakening, I now wish to experience the world, to
enjoy its beauty and its people. My curiosity pushes me, and it has left me open
to discovering my spirituality.
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M Y SPI R I T UA L I T Y
On my thirty-fifth birthday, March 20, 2003, the United States, in a coalition

with British, Australian, Polish, and Danish military forces, invaded Iraq with
the goal of toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. Despite the precision of
modern military technology, there were many innocent victims at the outset,
Iraqi men, women, and children accidentally killed in the line of fire. Within
days of the invasion, a church in Madison, Wisconsin, home to the University of
Wisconsin, where I was a professor, began planting white flags on their lawn to
honor those children. It was a church that we had driven by countless times
without taking notice. With the flags, however, the church got our attention, and
as the conflict dragged on, the lawn of the church was transformed into a sea of
white flags, a poignant expression of compassion and humanity in memory of
those innocent victims. That garden of flags, a symbol of the congregations
prayer for a quick end to the hostilities, provided a daily reminder of our good
fortune in a world in which so many others were victims of conflict.
Impressed by this moving display, Erika and I decided to attend a Sunday
service. Although religion had played little role in our family up to that point,
apart from attending services in Erikas church of origin whenever we were in
Montana, we felt a strong need to meet this congregation. It turned out that the
church, Madison Christian Community, is a partnership between two congrega-
tions: Community of Hope and Advent Lutheran Church. Although the two
congregations have different religious affiliations, they are partners. They have
common educational and community outreach activities; they even have a joint
church service once a month.
We attended a service at the Community of Hope, an open and affirming
congregation affiliated with the United Church of Christ. We were drawn by
their statement of welcome:
Community of Hope is an Open and Affirming community of faith

where no matter who you are or where you are on lifes journey,
you are welcome.
We come together
As people on a journey,
Respectful of our diversity,
Supportive of our callings and committed to learning what it means
to be the body of Christ in the world today.
We celebrate all races, abilities, creeds, socioeconomic statuses, religious
upbringings and sexual orientations.
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CHAPTER 34
Having grown up without religion, I was comforted by those words. We were

indeed welcomed and embraced by this community on our first visit, and we
realized on the spot that we had been leading lives that lacked spirituality and a
sense of community.
The congregation was led by Pastor Tisha Brown, an intelligent and vibrant
woman whose weekly sermons erased my earlier fears of church: How would the
congregation view heaven and hell? Was it really important to choose the right
version of the Bible? How should Christians be viewed within the context of a
worldwide community? How would other religious traditions be viewed? None
of those questions mattered. The congregation that Tisha led was indeed open
and affirming in every way.
Tisha challenged us to deepen our spirituality and to perform work in search
of justice and an improved quality of life for people everywhere. For this former
tiger boy who was raised in a nonreligious kaikin home, her messages shook the
foundations of my very being. Her sermons and the friends we made at the
Community of Hope challenged me to rethink my purpose; they helped me
develop my spirituality; and they helped me become a better person.
In 2004, I asked Tisha to baptize me. As part of the process, I had to meet with
her to discuss the church, the community, and my expected role as a future
member. As a prerequisite, she asked me to explain my personal spiritual path. I
came to our first meeting prepared. I brought Kanigels The Man Who Knew
Infinity with me, and I told her about my life and the great Indian genius whose
ideas came to him as visions from a goddess.
What would it take for my parents to open themselves to the possibility of a
life of the spirit? I asked at the beginning of this book. Recall that during their
childhood, Emperor Hirohito, who was viewed as a god to the Japanese people,
had been forced to surrender and abandon his divine status. I theorized that this
event left many Japanese, like my parents, jaded and closed to any form of
spirituality.
My parents now belong to a church in Lutherville. For the past ten years, they
have enjoyed their membership in a spiritual community. Although we have
never talked about it, I believe that my father, like me, has learned to recognize
and celebrate the things of this world and of the mind and spirit as fragments of
the divine. I had run away from home so that I could be as little like my father as
possible. I was surprised when Basil Gordon prophesied that I would follow in
my fathers footsteps. I was even more surprised when Ramanujan emerged as
the link that bound my fathers history to mine. Did he also have a role in bring-
ing my parents to think more about spirituality and community?
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Epilogue
My Pilgrimages
P
ilgrimages are not unique to one religion. They are retreats from nor-
mal life to focus on spiritual values or to honor a particular place or
person. Because of my life story, I had a strong need to make a pilgrim-
age to honor Ramanujan.
Almost fifteen years ago, around the time I moved to the University of Wisconsin
from Penn State, the Dutch mathematician Sander Zwegers, in his doctoral disserta-
tion written under the direction of Don Zagier, finally made sense out of Ramanujans
mock theta functions, the mathematics he had conjured on his deathbed. Almost
concurrently, the German mathematicians Jan Bruinier and Jens Funke developed
a general theory of such functions that then made use of Zwegerss work to show
that Ramanujan had anticipated the theory of harmonic Maass forms.
Armed with these advances, Kathrin Bringmann and I proved a number of
theorems on Ramanujans mathematics that earned us many invitations, one
of which came from India. I was invited to speak at the 2005 SASTRA University
conference on number theory. SASTRA University, located in Ramanujans
hometown of Kumbakonam, had decided to establish an award in honor of
Ramanujan, a prize to be bestowed on mathematicians not exceeding the age of
thirty-two who have made outstanding contributions to areas of mathematics
influenced by Ramanujan. I was invited by SASTRA to give an address at the
inaugural SASTRA Prize Conference.
My dream had finally come true. I was offered the opportunity to make a
pilgrimage to India, to seek Ramanujan, to see his home, his temple, and his
schools. Krishnaswami (Krishna) Alladi, a number theorist at the University of

K. Ono, A.D. Aczel, My Search for Ramanujan, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2
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Florida and the founding editor of the Ramanujan Journal, kindly facilitated our
visits to these special places. My travel companions were the SASTRA award
winners, my friends Sound and Manjul Bhargava. This would be my first of
many trips to India.
After final exams at the University of Wisconsin in December 2005, I boarded
a plane at the Dane County airport. Forty hours later, I was in India, in Chennai,
the city where Ramanujan had written his deathbed letter on mock theta func-
tions eighty-five years earlier. This is the city where he passed away tragically at
the age of thirty-two with Janaki by his side.
Chennai was not the final destination. I still had the long journey to
Kumbakonam, Ramanujans childhood home and the site of the SASTRA con-
ference. SASTRA University arranged a private minivan, barely large enough to
accommodate the American mathematicians attending the conference, which
included Sound, Manjul, Manjuls mother, Krishna, and my doctoral student
Karl Mahlburg.
My arrival in Chennai had been delayed by a winter storm in Europe, which
left almost no time to relax before the long bus ride. Manjul graciously offered
his hotel room for a quick shower, after which we departed for Kumbakonam
straightaway.
Although Kumbakonam is only 180 miles from Chennai, the drive took over
six hours. At first, we poked along in the ridiculous congestion that defines
Chennai traffic. Imagine inching along in a sea of bicycles, small cars, cows,
goats, motorcycles, and rickshawsstoplights being mere suggestions. I assumed
that the traffic conditions would improve once we escaped the city. In some
ways, they did. Our speed improved outside the city, but the driving conditions
deteriorated. The roads narrowed, and they had been severely damaged by recent
flooding, which had scoured out deep potholes. That preposterous ride rivaled
the most extreme turbulence I have ever experienced in an airplane, and it went
on and on and on for nearly thirty miles. I had no idea that a 180-mile drive
could be so physically demanding. We arrived in Kumbakonam after dusk, and
we were greeted by the staff of the hotel, who draped lovely garlands around our
necks and imprinted red tilaks on our foreheads. They kindly offered glasses of
delicious rose water, perfect elixirs after such a grueling ride, and then they
massaged our feet.
Our hotel, the secluded Sterling Resort, was a collection of carefully restored
nineteenth-century buildings that had been an abandoned rustic village. The
grounds were complete with a small farm, livestock, large sculptures of Hindu
gods, and a museum.
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The next morning, I took a short stroll around the grounds. It seemed as
though we had somehow taken a journey back in time. After a breakfast of
masala dosa, one of my favorite south Indian dishes, we boarded the minivan for
the short drive to SASTRA University, the site of the Conference on Number
Theory and Mathematical Physics and home of the Srinivasa Ramanujan
Centre. The day began with the presentation of the first SASTRA Ramanujan
Prize, awarded jointly to my friends Manjul and Sound. The dazzling ceremony
included the lighting of a tall polished brass lamp, traditional Indian songs, and
a passionate speech by the executive director of the Indo-US Science and
Technology Forum, an organization that promotes collaboration in science,
technology, engineering, and biomedical research between the United States and
India.
After a full slate of lectures, the invited speakers were driven to two sacred
sites: Ramanujans childhood home and the Sarangapani Temple. We first visited
Ramanujans home, a one-story stucco house that sits inconspicuously among a
row of shops. This house, which had deteriorated and was in a dilapidated condi-
tion for several decades, was purchased and beautifully restored by SASTRA
University. At SASTRAs invitation, Indias president, Abdul Kalam, visited the
home in 2003, and he was so impressed that he declared it a national museum.
Sound and Manjul in front of Ramanujans boyhood home (photo by Krishnaswami Alladi)
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The house is devoid of any striking features. In the front, there is a small porch,
one of Ramanujans favorite places to do mathematics. We took many photos of
the porch, and we tried to imagine Ramanujan as a young boy, performing his
calculations there on his slate. I spent the next half hour pacing through the
diminutive house, which consisted of two small rooms and a kitchen.
The very small bedroom is found immediately on the left as you enter the
front door, and its only distinguished features are a small window facing the
street and an old-fashioned bed occupying nearly half the floor space. The muse-
ums exhibits, which include a bust of Ramanujan decorated with garlands, are
lovingly displayed in the main room. On the day we visited, there was a beautiful
kolam in front of the bust, an intricate, symmetric floral design on the brick floor
created out of rice flour. In the rear part of Ramanujans house there is a tiny
courtyard with an old well.
Two blocks away, the Sarangapani Temple towered over Ramanujans neigh-
borhood. There, Ramanujan and his family regularly offered prayers to the
Hindu god Vishnu, one of whose epithets is Sarangapani, the bow-carrier.
Ramanujan used to work on his mathematics in its great halls, sheltered from
the heat and humidity by its stone walls. I tried to picture Ramanujan working
out his mathematics on his slate with his notebook by his side.
The Sarangapani Temple (photo by Krishnaswami Alladi)
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The brilliant orange of the suns rays formed a corona around the colossal struc-
ture, which beckoned us as we stood on the porch of Ramanujans house. The
temple, built mostly between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, was
constructed from stone brought from north India by elephant. The temple is
tetragonal, and its outer walls are completely covered with colorful ornate carv-
ings depicting countless Hindu legends.
Immediately beyond the gopuram, the temple gate, dozens of bats circled
above us against the darkening sky. A few steps away, we could see cows eating
hay. The interior of the temple is a stunning labyrinth of sculptures, stone col-
umns, brass walls, flickering lights and candles, and brass pillars. The walls are
completely covered with ornate metalwork and stone carvings. Following Hindu
tradition, we stepped barefoot over the stone floor in a clockwise direction,
passing dozens of kolam floor designs. The air was warm and muggy, and heavy
with the scent of incense. The main central shrine is a monolith resembling a
chariot drawn by horses and elephants. Beyond the monolith we found the inner
sanctum, protected by a pair of ancient bulky wooden doors covered with bells.
The inner sanctum, bursting with silver and bronze vessels, is considered the
bronze-walled resting place of Lord Vishnu. Krishna and his cheerful wife,
Mathura, called us into the inner sanctum and made offerings of coconuts and
vegetables to Lord Vishnu, placed by sweaty bare-chested Hindu priests clad in
holy white robes. I understood that Krishna had arranged for us to be blessed in
this impassioned pooja, or ceremony of propitiation.
As we made our way back toward the gate of the temple, I came upon a small
set of steps that led to a small cubbyhole holding the statue of a Hindu god
flanked by melted candles. Its ancient stone walls were covered with numbers
scrawled in charcoal and carved in stone. Ramanujans temple had special num-
bers! Sounds father explained that it is not unusual for Hindus to etch impor-
tant numbers when making offerings. Some numbers appeared to be birthdays,
while others appeared to be telephone numbers and street addresses. I excitedly
searched for numbers made famous by Ramanujan, such as Hardys taxicab
number (to be described later). I didnt find any. However, to my great surprise,
I found 2719 prominently etched at eye level. For me, this number is special.
It is the largest odd number thatas Sound and I had proved with near cer-
taintyis not represented by Ramanujans ternary quadratic form x2+y2+10z2.
I was delighted to see it near where Ramanujan might have been writing in his
notebook a century ago. I have now visited India several times, and I always
make it a point to check on my sacred 2719 etched delicately in a niche in
Ramanujans temple.
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The next day provided another full program. My student Karl gave a superb
talk on his thesis research, which would earn him a postdoc at MIT and the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Paper of the Year Award. I then
gave my lecture on my work with Kathrin on mock theta functions and Maass
forms. Kathrin would win a SASTRA Ramanujan Award a few years later in
large part because of these results.
At 3:00 p.m., we boarded the minivan for further sightseeing. We visited
Government College, the first college to dismiss Ramanujan, and Town High
School, where he excelled before becoming addicted to mathematics. At
Government College, I had hoped to see the original copy of Carrs book, the
one that awakened Ramanujans genius. Unfortunately, the book was lost.
After the short visit to Government College, we made our way to Town High
School, the site of Ramanujans first academic successes. We arrived after classes
had ended for the day. The school was an impressive two-story building with
arched balconies and a lush tropical courtyard. We were greeted by
A. Ramamoorthy and S. Krishnamurthy, two of the schools teachers. They
kindly gave us an entertaining tour of campus, which included a stop in
Ramanujan Hall, a cavernous room dedicated to the memory of Ramanujan.
The teachers also proudly displayed copies of awards that Ramanujan had won
as a top student. I was deeply moved by the pride with which they shared their
campus and their devotion to the story of Ramanujan. Their passion confirmed
to me that Ramanujan is still treasured in India.
Near the end of our visit, Mr. Ramamoorthy revealed to us that he teaches
English, and as a student was never very good at math. He timidly asked whether
I could explain any of Ramanujans work to him, and from the look on his face,
it was clear that he didnt think that I could. I accepted the challenge. We found
a chalkboard, and I explained Ramanujans work on partitions. I explained the
partition numbers to him, and then told him that Ramanujan proved that every
fifth partition number, beginning with p(4)=5, is a multiple of 5. My new friends
were delighted by the simplicity of the result, and they promised to share it with
their students the next day. Mr. Ramamoorthy thanked me, and he joked, You
are not Mr. Ono, you are Mr. Oh-Yes. Although I would have hated hearing this
as a high-schooler, somehow in Kumbakonam it was music to my ears.
The conference ended the next day, on December 22, 2005, Ramanujans
birthday. Manjul delivered the Ramanujan Commemorative Lecture, a fascinat-
ing look at his work with Jonathan Hanke on quadratic forms. Manjul fittingly
noted that in his 1916 paper on quadratic forms, Ramanujan had already antici-
pated some of the most difficult problems in the subject. Manjuls final slide was
about my joint work with Sound, our result that proved (modulo the generalized
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Riemann hypothesis) that 2719 is the largest odd number that is not of the form
x2+y2+10z2. That slide was for me a poetic conclusion to the conference and my
pilgrimage: the number 2719 appearing at the end of the final lecture and
echoing from a small cubbyhole in the great halls of Ramanujans temple a few
miles away.
Three years ago, I had the chance to visit many of the other sites that are
important to Ramanujans history. The president of India had proclaimed 2012 a
National Year of Mathematics to honor the 125th anniversary of the birth of
Ramanujan. The Indian government provided the financial backing for the doc-
umentary The Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Nandan Kudhyadi, the director, asked me to appear in the film as one of the
experts on Ramanujans work, along with my friend A.Raghuram, the coordina-
tor of the mathematics program at the Indian Institute of Science Education and
Research, in Pune, India. I spent several weeks in October 2011 with a small film
crew visiting sites in south India that played an important role in Ramanujans
life. I visited Ramanujans birthplace in Erode. We visited Namakkal, a town that
dates to the seventh century. Namakkal is home to the Namagiri Temple where
Ramanujan had his vision that allowed him to accept Hardys invitation and
travel across the seas to Cambridge. We filmed at various locations in Madras,
including the hostel where Ramanujan lived before flunking out of college and
the neighborhood where he spent the last months of his life.
I even held, in my own hands, Ramanujans notebooks, the ones that have
been central to my mathematical career. As I held them, I was thinking, Oh my
God! Is this really okay? Have I earned the right to hold these sacred volumes?
We spent hours at the University of Madras, studying Ramanujans notebooks. I
could have spent days examining its pages. Holding the notebooks, the source of
so many treasures, was a spiritual experience that I will never forget. It is one of
the highlights of my life as a mathematician.
It was clear that Ramanujan had edited these notebooks carefullythey
clearly did not contain the raw results as he first obtained them. His mathemati-
cal formulas and equations are carefully written, on neat pages, usually only on
the right side of the page, although the left side would later be used as scrap
paper for calculations. Ramanujan wrote very carefully in green ink, clearly and
legibly.
Ramanujans notebooks (published after his death and edited by Bruce
C.Berndt) contain some work he did he while still a student at Town High in
Kumbakonam. Flipping through his first notebook, I immediately came across
some of that work, his results on magic squares, which are square arrays of num-
bers such that the sum of the numbers in each row and column and on the main
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Perusing Ramanujans notebooks with Raghuram (photo courtesy of Emory University)
diagonals, and often in subsquares within the main body of the square, add up
to the same number.
Magic squares with three rows and columns, called 3 by 3 (or 33) squares,
have been known since early antiquity. Chinese writings from about 650 b.c.e.,
the Lo Shu, or Scroll of the River Lo, contain a 33 magic square, an arrange-
ment of the numbers from 1 to 9:
4 9 2
3 5 7.
8 1 6
Note that the sum of every row, of every column, and of the two main diagonals
is 15, and that is what characterizes a regular 33 magic square. For a 44
magic square, containing the numbers from 1 to 16, the sums must be 34. In fact,
in the tenth-century temple complex in north India called Khajuraho, there is an
interesting 44 magic square, attesting to the fascination in ancient India for
such objects. The fact that this square is in a temple suggests some religious or
spiritual connection between mathematics and the gods.
I stared in awe at the huge 8 8 square Ramanujan had constructed and
recorded in his first notebook. He also discussed some properties he saw in
magic squares, for example, that the middle row, middle column, and each
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diagonal in a 3 3 square form an arithmetic progression. Arithmetic progres-

sions are sequences in which the adjacent numbers share a common difference.
In the 3 3 square above, the arithmetic progressions in question are (3, 5, 7),
(9, 5, 1), (4, 5, 6), and (8, 5, 2).
The documentary provided me with a second pilgrimage to pay homage to
Ramanujan. This time, I had the chance to share it with Indian filmmakers and
mathematicians who would be telling the story to the public. This trip, with
Kudhyadi, Raghuram, and my new friend Venkateswaran Thathamangalam
Viswanathan, filled in many of my cultural gaps in the Ramanujan story.
Face toFace withRamanujan
If anyone were to ask me what one person I would want to meet in all of history,
my answer, as the reader may easily guess, would be Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Amazingly, my wish came true, in a way.
In the last week of July 2014, I received an unexpected email from film direc-
tor Matthew Brown. I had heard eight years earlier that Matt had written a
screenplay for a film on Ramanujan based on Robert Kanigels book The Man
Who Knew Infinity. I hadnt heard anything further about it in years, and so I
naturally assumed that the project had been scrapped.
I was delighted to learn from Matt that the film was well into preproduction.
I was already excited by the promise of the forthcoming mathy biopics The
Theory of Everything, about Stephen Hawking, and The Imitation Game, about
Alan Turing. Those films would soon earn wide critical acclaim, including mul-
tiple Oscar nominations. Both films would go on to win Academy Awards.
Perhaps this film on Ramanujan would be the next British math prestige film.
Dev Patel, the twenty-four-year-old star of the hit Slumdog Millionaire, was
cast to play Ramanujan, and Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons was cast to
play Hardy.
The Pressman Film Company, producers of over eighty films including Conan
the Barbarian, The Crow, and Wall Street, was producing the film at Pinewood
Studios, in London. Filming was set to begin early in August.
Matts email was short. He wanted to skype the next morning to discuss the
film. He mentioned something about technical assistance for the art depart-
ment. I had no idea that this would lead to a whirlwind opportunity of a lifetime,
the closest I would ever get to meeting Ramanujan face-to-face.
The next morning, I skyped with Matt and Liz Colbert, an Irish graphic artist
well known for her work on the TV show Game of Thrones and the blockbuster
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film Sherlock Holmes, which starred Robert Downey Jr. Liz was charged with
producing the mathematical props for the film. She needed help in identifying
the documents to be used, which would have to be painstakingly reproduced by
hand. My job was to choose these documents, including some of Ramanujans
letters to Hardy and select pages from the notebooks.
Our skype session extended well beyond the scheduled thirty minutes. There
was simply too much to discuss, and much work to do. I could tell that the art
department was relieved to know that I knew my stuff. I knew the documents by
heart, and I knew the story. Within minutes, I was the man in charge of the
math. I was thrilled that Matt had decided to pay attention to such details. There
was to be no fudging. He wanted to be true to the story, and that included excep-
tional attention to detail regarding the mathematics in the film.
Matt thanked me for my offer of help, clearly relieved that getting the math
right was no longer a worry. He had no idea that I would have dropped every-
thing to work on the film.
I wanted to know about the last-minute tasks that had to be completed before
filming could begin, and I learned about the frenetic last days of preproduction.
Matt had to finalize schedules, oversee the production of props, visit locations,
and he had yet to finish casting. Among his concerns, he mentioned a little detail
that the research department had been struggling to solve. They had been unable
to find Janakis autograph. Even though it probably would not appear in the film,
Matt wanted it just in case. Did I have any leads?
I proudly exclaimed that I didnt need any leads, because I had Janakis
autograph. In fact, her autograph had been in my possession for fifteen years,
and in my fathers for the fifteen years before that, since that day in 1984 when
her letter to my father arrived in our mailbox in Lutherville, Maryland. Matt and
Liz looked at each other and laughed in surprise at their good luck. Luck? I
wasnt so sure.
A few hours later, Matt emailed me again with a handsome offer that I couldnt
refuse. So I didnt, and three days later, I found myself on a flight to London. I
would end up spending several weeks working on the film. At first, my job was
to help the art department with the formulas. I had no idea that I would end up
doing much more. In fact, I would ultimately be named an associate producer.
The Pressman Production Company arranged a luxurious hotel room for me
near Paddington Station, the location being based on my requirement of prox-
imity to a competition swimming pool. I was training for the International
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Triathlon Unions Cross Triathlon World Championships, which would be held

in Zittau, Germany, at the end of August.
Preproduction at Pinewood Studios, which was also filming Star Wars:
Episode VII, was frantic. The art department was busily producing props, includ-
ing copies of Ramanujans letters and notebooks. Liz and I carefully went over
the documents that she needed scene by scene.
Three days before filming was to begin, Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel arrived at
the studio for rehearsals. I had hoped to get a glimpse of them working with
Matt. I was working with Liz in her office when a production assistant rushed in
with the message that the principals wanted to see me.
A few minutes later, I was in a quiet room with Matt, Jeremy Irons, and Dev
Patel, secluded from the rest of the preproduction frenzy. Matt introduced me,
and I nervously shook their hands. Matt handed me a script and said that we
were going to rehearse. Oh my God! Oh my God! I couldnt believe it. I was
going to get more than a glimpse!
Jeremy and Dev had asked for me because they wanted to know how a math-
ematician thinks. No true actor is content merely to deliver his lines. How did
Hardy and Ramanujan think about mathematics? How did they speak about it?
Write about it? What sort of gestures would they have used? They explained to
me that what they wanted from me was something like what actors get from a
dialect coach. They couldnt slip into their roles without an expert on hand
explaining how these men would have thought and spoken.
The four of us sat in a circle in a second-floor room at Pinewood Studios. This
was the place that had made the James Bond films, the Harry Potter films, the
Captain America films, and the Sherlock Holmes films. Oh my God, and I was
there with a job to do! This was more than a tour of the Wonka chocolate factory.
I was going to help make the chocolate!
Those rehearsals were amazing in many different ways. As a fan of film, it was
my chance to observe firsthand some of the worlds finest actors at work. I had
no idea how difficult it is to be a serious actor. Our work on the scenes followed
a standard pattern. Matt would begin by giving the outline of each scene and its
role in the film. Then the actors would read the lines out loud. The three of them
would then discuss what they had to do to make the scene work. Perfecting a
scene involved reworking lines, working out facial expressions and body lan-
guage, and discussing the props, all in a quest for authenticity.
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With Jeremy Irons on the set (photo by Sam Pressman)
They all had lots of questions for me. By the end of the first hour, I understood
what was required of me, and I was comfortable enough to speak up and offer
suggestions and comments. They trusted my opinion and judgment as the math
consultant. All along, I was thinking that my passion for Ramanujan and his
mathematics was about to make the world stage, performed by the worlds best.
Unbelievable!
Going over the script with Dev and Jeremy was beyond a dream come true. It
wasnt even something I would ever have dreamt of wishing for. Although I
doubt that Hardy ever called anyone babycakes, as Jeremy did me, I will forever
cherish these rehearsals as the closest I will ever come to being face-to-face with
Hardy and Ramanujan.
To celebrate the end of preproduction, Edward Pressman hosted a small pri-
vate party at a fancy London restaurant. To my surprise, he asked me to say a few
words about Ramanujan and his mathematics. Although I am accustomed to
giving lectures about Ramanujan, this short speech was something special. With
a glass of champagne in hand, I did my best to speak eloquently about Ramanujan,
the man I had been searching for most of my life. And there was Dev Patel, the
man who would play Ramanujan, seated directly across from me.
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Preproduction party (left to right: Edward Pressman, Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel, Ken Ono, Matt
Brown, Sorel Carradine) (photo by Sam Pressman)
My Search Goes On
Building on the success I enjoyed in seeking the hidden meaning in Ramanujans

writingshis claim that there are no other simple properties for partitions other
than the ones he had found, his search for a simple law that determines the odd
numbers not of the form x2+y2+10z2, I decided to study his works in detail on
the belief that Ramanujan, speaking beyond the grave, has vouchsafed hints of
beautiful theories to the mathematicians of today. I hear him speaking to me
when I read his papers. And if I read them with care, I might be lucky enough to
figure out what he had in mind.
I have spent the last five years as a professor at Emory University, working on
some of Ramanujans mathematics and its implications for contemporary ques-
tions. Jan Bruinier and I revisited the partition numbers and the work of Hardy
and Ramanujan that gave the approximate formula for those numbers described
below in the section on Eulers partition numbers. In the 1930s, building on the
HardyRamanujan formula, which gives good approximations but never the
exact values, Hans Rademacher obtained an exact formula. However, his for-
mula had a catch. His description of the partition numbers was as a convergent
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infinite sum. (Since a partition number is an integer, you could use Rademachers
formula to compute individual partition numbers: you know that you have
arrived at the correct value after adding a finite number of terms when you can
estimate the sum of the infinite number of remaining terms as being less than a
small fraction.) We aimed to find a different conceptual formulaone that
involved only finitely many terms.
We reformulated the problem in terms of concepts that we had already been
using on related problems. By modifying work that Jan had done with Jens Funke,
we produced a formula that gives the exact values of the partition numbers as a
finite sum of algebraic numbers (these are relatively well behaved rational or irra-
tional numbers) that are themselves values of a single special function. And in
joint work with Drew Sutherland of MIT, we were able to express our formula in
a way that could be, and now has been, implemented on a computer.
I have thought very deeply about the mathematics in Ramanujans first letter
to Hardy. The first challenge of that letter was to understand how Ramanujan
came up with his R(q) continued fraction, the one that generalizes the golden
ratio. Ole Warnaar, a well-known mathematician at the University of Queensland,
had been working on this problem too.
I learned two years ago that Ole had made a huge breakthrough concerning
certain hypergeometric series transformation laws, results that experts believed
could hold the key to finding more identities of the type that Rogers and
Ramanujan had discovered a century earlier. Ole had found infinite families of
power series identities that included the special continued fractions that
Ramanujan discussed in his first letter to Hardy.
I immediately contacted Ole by email, and I suggested that we join forces.
Together with my PhD student Michael Griffin, we made use of Oles beautiful
formulas to establish a framework in which to place the RogersRamanujan
identities, which we then put to good use to obtain infinitely many generaliza-
tions of the golden ratio, algebraic units that are the values of the functions that
Ole had discovered. What Ramanujan had offered in his first letter to Hardy
turned out to be the first example of the functions we now understood.
Discover magazine ranked our accomplishment fifteenth among the top hun-
dred stories in science of 2014. The editors conducted a Peoples Choice Award,
and our work on Ramanujans first letter came in second.
Like his first letter to Hardy, Ramanujans last also speaks to the mathemati-
cians and physicists of today. In that letter, he described his enigmatic mock
theta functions, which have been studied by the Japanese physicists Tohru
Eguchi, Hirosi Ooguri, and Yuji Tachikawa and the Canadian mathematician
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E pi l o gu e
George Andrews, Michael Griffin, Ken Ono, Ole Warnaar, Jim Lepowsky
Terry Gannon. Building on their work, Miranda Cheng (University of

Amsterdam), John Duncan (Case Western), and Jeff Harvey (UChicago) formu-
lated a conjecture in 2010 that predicted a very deep and precise relationship
between Ramanujans mock theta functionsthe stuff of Ramanujans deathbed
letter to Hardyand the hottest item in theoretical physics today: string theory.
Their conjecture, which they called the umbral moonshine conjecture, was for-
mulated to place Berkeley mathematician Richard Borcherdss 1992 proof of the
so-called moonshine conjecture, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal, in
a wider context. If correct, Borcherdss work would be the first of many different
moonshine theories. Mathematical physicists were now realizing that such
theories are important in string theory, which aims to answer a fundamental
question: what is the universe made of?
In joint work with John Duncan and my PhD student Michael Griffin, we
proved the umbral moonshine conjecture, a result that now places the mathe-
matics of Ramanujans deathbed letter front and center in cutting-edge
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E pi l o gu e
With Ramanujans last letter to Hardy in 2013 at Trinity College
mathematical physics. We had proved that the functions he conjured in the last
months of his life encode astonishing symmetries in the world of mathematics,
and experts now predict that his functions will be put to good use in the study of
black holes, quantum gravity, and the theory of everything. Discover magazine
has informed us that our accomplishment will be among the top 100 stories in
science of 2015.
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E pi l o gu e
John Duncan, Ken Ono, Michael Griffin
The search for Ramanujan shall go on. His words still speak to us.
My mathematical search for Ramanujan is a never-ending story. As I continue
my quest, I find again and again that I have overestimated my ability to under-
stand the full meaning in Ramanujans notebooks, letters, and papers.
Ramanujans legacy is inexhaustible.
221
Afterword
Two Questions
I
am often asked about Ramanujan and his story. Was Hardy the best men-
tor for Ramanujan? Was Ramanujan the greatest mathematician of his
timeor perhaps of all time?
Was Hardy the best mentor for Ramanujan? This is a difficult question to
answer. People have raised this question for a variety of reasons. Hardy was not
an expert on theta functions and modular forms, areas in which one arguably
finds Ramanujans most important contributions. Would mathematics have
advanced further had he been mentored by an expert in those fields? Some say
that Hardy selfishly made use of Ramanujans intellect instead of helping him to
become a more professional mathematician. Would Ramanujan have been a
more important mathematician had he been mentored by someone who did not
need him as a collaborator?
Although these are legitimate questions, the point is moot. We cannot travel
back in time and change history. But if we must wonder, here are my thoughts.
In India, Ramanujan worked in a vacuum; there was no one to nurture his talent.
Hardy recognized Ramanujans ability when others ignored him, and he brought
him to England and helped him make his mathematics understandable and pre-
sentable to the world. Had this never happened, then Ramanujan would likely
have disappeared without a trace. Had this never happened, I would never have
happened. I will therefore always hold Hardy in very high regard. Opinions vary
on whether Hardy could have taken steps that would have saved Ramanujans
life. I am not qualified to speculate, and I dont wish to speculate.

K. Ono, A.D. Aczel, My Search for Ramanujan, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2
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It is true that there were mathematicians who might have recognized

Ramanujans talent and creativity in the theory of modular forms and theta func-
tions. However, I doubt that any of them would have been inspired to calculate
partition numbers, a problem that deeply interested Hardy. Had Ramanujan had
such a mentor, then analytic number theory would have missed out on one of its
most important advances, the development of the circle method. Moreover,
had Hardy and Ramanujan never done their work on partitions, then Rademacher
would have had nothing to perfect, and the theory of Rademacher sums wouldnt
exist. And without the theory of Rademacher sums, much of the current work in
mathematical physics wouldnt exist.
The questions that I really wonder about are these: What would Ramanujan
have discovered with the help of a computer? What would he have discovered
had he not died tragically at the age of thirty-two?
Alas, the world will never know.
Was Ramanujan the greatest mathematician of his timeor perhaps all time?
My answer is best framed in the context of the lovely article The two cultures of
mathematics, by Timothy Gowers, a recent British Fields medalist and current
professor and Fellow of Trinity College. In that article, Gowers argues that there
are really two kinds of mathematicians, generally speaking: those that are prob-
lem solvers and those that are theory builders. Gowers gives two examples to
which he thought most mathematicians could relate. The first is Paul Erds, who
with no real home, famously traveled the world, living from his suitcase, work-
ing with other mathematicians. Erds was a problem solver, and his many
papers, written with over five hundred collaborators, are solutions to problems,
stated, of course, as theorems or other mathematical results. Erds was so pro-
lific, and published so many papers with so many collaborators around the
world, that his colleagues honored him by assigning an Erds number to
mathematicians based on the length of the chain of collaboration. Those who
collaborated directly with Erds have Erds number 1; those who did not col-
laborate directly but collaborated with those collaborators have Erds number 2,
and so on, in a sort of six degrees of separation math game.
As for the other type of mathematician, Gowers gives the example of Sir
Michael Atiyah, of Oxford. It is not that Atiyah didnt solve any problemsof
course he did, and the famous AtiyahSinger theorem named for him could be
viewed as a problem that the two mathematicians solved. But Atiyahs purpose as
a mathematician, as Gowers shows from articles and interviews, was to pursue a
theoryto stretch and test mathematics to its limits and then to extend those
limits to build more mathematical structures. To be sure, there is an overlap, and
theory builders also solve problems, and problem solvers, through their solutions,
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A f t e rwor d
also extend our knowledge as a whole, and hence build theory. But based on
their entire output, Atiyah and Erds can serve as representatives of the two
groups.
Alexander Grothendieck is probably the best recent example of a theory
builder. With his students, he rebuilt the field of algebraic geometry. He cared so
little for details that he was famously quoted as once saying, when someone inter-
rupted a talk he was giving asking for an example of a prime number, Well, take
57. Of course, 57 is not prime, since it equals 319. Andrew Wiles, of course,
could be called a master problem solver for solving the greatest unsolved prob-
lem of all time: Fermats last theorem. But in contrast to the problems solved by
Erds, a behemoth of a theory underlies Wiless solution, namely the Langlands
program, which in a sense is unifying major branches of mathematics.
Ramanujan could well be viewed as a problem solver, because much of his
work consisted in actually solving a huge number of extremely complicated
problems in mathematics. But there are theories lurking behind those problems,
and the problems are part of the theory. Therefore, in Ramanujans case we
should resist classifying him as either a problem solver or a theory builder.
In his biography of Ramanujan, Kanigel uses the following analogy to describe
Ramanujans prowess as a mathematician:
A car mechanic reliant on mechanical instinct may know how an engine

works yet be unable to set down the physical and chemical principles
governing it.
Because of his lack of formal training and the fact that he was set in his math-
ematical ways by the time he reached Cambridge, Ramanujan could not be a
theory builder, simply because he didnt know enough about how mathematics
worked as an edifice. But his intuition was supreme100 on a scale of 0 to 100
that Hardy had suggested, in which he gave himself a mere 25, and the great
David Hilbert an 80. His immensely powerful intuition, then, allowed Ramanujan
to propose and sometimes prove very difficult and unexpected problems in
mathematics, but he was not a Grothendiecksomeone who built theories with
little concern for individual problems.
So here is my answer to the question whether Ramanujan was the greatest math-
ematician of his timeperhaps of all time. Ramanujan was a gift; he should be
remembered as the greatest anticipator of mathematics. Although he was recognized
during his lifetime, his most important ideas, those that have powered mathemati-
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A f t e rwor d
cians after his death, were largely viewed as insignificant while he was alive. Those
ideas are typically found in his notebooks, letters, and papers as innocent-looking
formulas and expressions. Those gems have offered visions of the future, hints of
subjects conjured long after his death. For mathematicians, theorems and proofs are
works of art, and these formulas are reminiscent of the masterpieces by the Dutch
artist Vincent van Gogh, who died at the age of thirty-seven, before his work was
fully appreciated.
Ramanujans formulas have inspired many influential mathematicians, such
as Andrews, Deligne, Dyson, Selberg, Serre, Weil, to name just a few, and they
have supplied prototypes of deeper objects in algebraic number theory, combi-
natorics, and physics. Ramanujan was an incredibly great mathematician, cer-
tainly up there with the greatest in history. He had a gift of imagination the like
of which the world of mathematics had never seen before.
Fermats Last Theorem andtheTokyoNikko Conference
The 1955 TokyoNikko meeting, which was a pivotal event in my fathers life,
turned out to be a pivotal event in the history of mathematics. At that confer-
ence, Yutaka Taniyama, one of my fathers close friends, posed a problem that
suggested a deep connection between seemingly unrelated objects: modular
forms and elliptic curves. This problem would evolve over time, and its final
form became known as the TaniyamaWeil conjecture, the ShimuraTaniyama
Weil conjecture, and the modularity conjecture. Goro Shimura, who also
attended the symposium, was a star, a leader among the young ambitious
Japanese mathematicians.
Although number theorists understood the importance of the modularity
conjecture early on, it was the work of Berkeley mathematician Ken Ribet in the
late 1980s that catapulted the conjecture to prominence. Ribet proved that the
conjecture implies Fermats last theorem.
Ribets work provided a new approach to Fermat: prove the modularity con-
jecture. Although mathematicians were excited to learn of the deep connection
between the modularity conjecture and Fermats last theorem, few believed that
it would lead anywhere. The result was viewed as further evidence that both
problems would be difficult to solve, that they might remain unresolved for gen-
erations. But then in 1993, Andrew Wiles made world news when he announced
that he had proved Fermats last theorem. That proof made use of Ribets
theorem.
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A f t e rwor d
Ken Ribet, Peter Sarnak, Ken Ono in 2014 (photo by Ling Long)
In this way, the proof of Fermats last theorem, one of the most important
events in the history of mathematics, was born from humble beginnings: an
innocent question raised by an unproven young Japanese mathematician at a
conference intended to promote reconciliation and world peace in the name of
science.
Tragically, Taniyama did not live to enjoy the glorious work that sprouted
from his conjecture. Suffering from depression and a loss of confidence, he com-
mitted suicide on November 17, 1958. One month later, his fiance, Misako
Suzuki, also committed suicide, and she left behind a note in which she wrote,
We promised each other that no matter where we went, we would never be
separated. Now that he is gone, I must go too in order to join him.
Their deaths are tragic, but in a way, their suicides may have made sense to
their families and friends. In Japanese culture, there is a long history and tradi-
tion of suicide. There is the concept of an honorable suicide, such as seppuku
practiced by the samurai; the crashing of ones plane into enemy ships as prac-
ticed by World War II kamikaze pilots; and suicide intended to prevent shame
from befalling ones family. And Misako Suzukis suicide is part of a long tradi-
tion in Japan of shinj, or love-suicide, the unhappy lovers believing that they
will be reunited in heaven.
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Mathematical Gems
This book would not be complete without a discussion of some of Ramanujans

works. Here we include a small sample of Ramanujans mathematical ideas and
conjectures.
The HardyRamanujan Taxicab Number
While Ramanujan was lying ill, this time at a hospital in Putney, just outside
London, Hardy would come to see him by taking a train from Cambridge to
London, and then a taxi to Putney. And so one day, Hardy made the trip to see
Ramanujan. In an attempt to lift the ailing mathematicians spirits, Hardy led off
with a casual comment about a number, numbers being Ramanujans favorite topic:
I came here in a taxi with a very dull number: 1729. But to Ramanujan, who was
said to be a friend of every integer, that number wasnt dull at all. To Hardys sur-
prise, Ramanujan gathered what strength he had, jumped up in bed, and cried,
No, Hardyit is a very interesting number! It is the smallest number expressible
as the sum of two cubes in two different ways! (1729 = 103 + 93 = 13 + 123 ). From
this event, the mathematical study of taxicab numbersthe smallest numbers that
can be expressed as the sum of two (positive) cubes in n distinct waysemerged.
To date, only six taxicab numbers have been identified.
Ramanujan was aware of this property of 1729 because of work he had done
on a problem studied by Euler that can be found in his notebooks. The number
1729 appears in Ramanujans works in yet another context, this time related to
Fermats last theorem. It appears that he was thinking about near misses to
Fermats claim. That is, the Fermat conjecture would be false if there existed a
positive integer n (greater than 2) and nonzero integers x, y, and z such that
xn+yn=zn. It turns out that Fermats last theorem comes close to being false
one unit shortfor n=3. The number 1729 is the sum of two cubes (powers of
n=3): 93+103, in one of the two possibilities. But 1729 is not itself a cube. If it
were, Fermats theorem would be false. But 1729 misses being a cube by only
one unit, since 1728 is a cube: 1728 = 123 .
Two years ago, I visited the Wren Library at Trinity College, where I studied
the Ramanujan archives. To my surprise, I found a page in Ramanujans hand-
writing in which he lists families of near misses to Fermats last theorem, and one
he offers is 1 + 123 = 93 + 103 . It turns out that he had discovered identities that
mathematicians would later find to be important in algebraic geometry and
mathematical physics. Together with my PhD student Sarah Trebat-Leder, we
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A f t e rwor d
have discovered that these identities can be reformulated as statements about K3

surfaces and ranks of elliptic curves, two important subjects that did not exist in
Ramanujans day.
Ramanujans page on sums of two cubes and near misses to the cubic Fermat equation (photo cour-
tesy of Trinity College)
Ramanujan derived so many formulas and theorems in Cambridge that it has

taken mathematicians decades to resolve his findings. This book would not be
complete without discussing some of his results. Here we offer a glimpse of some
of his most well known and influential works.
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A f t e rwor d
Approximations to
Early in their collaboration, Hardy and Ramanujan went over the claims that so
densely filled his letters and the notebooks that Ramanujan had brought to
England. In all, there were three or four thousand such results!filling pages
and pages.
The year Ramanujan arrived in England, his first paper was published in an
English journal, the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics. It was titled Modular
Equations and Approximations to Pi, and it included amazing formulas for
p = 3.1415926 ,
well known to every schoolchild as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to

its diameter. The number is an example of an irrational number, a number that
cannot be described as a simple ratio of integers. One consequence of its irratio-
nality is that its decimal expansion is infinite, running on forever without a dis-
cernible pattern, in contrast to the pattern that can be seen in the decimal
expansion of the rational number
5 / 7 = 0.714285714285714285714285714285714 .

Amateur and professional mathematicians alike have been captivated by the
decimal expansion of . Despite the fact that is easily described as a simple
ratio in a circle, it is not so simple to calculate its decimal places.
I find it incredible that in 2013, ninety-nine years after Ramanujan wrote his
first paper with Hardy, the Russian-American brothers David and Gregory
Chudnovsky used a home-built supercomputer running a variant of Ramanujans
formula to determine the first 12.1 trillion digits of this number (with earlier
estimates of ten trillion digits of in 2011 and five million digits in 2010). Their
algorithm uses a very rapidly converging infinite series that is a relative of
Ramanujans original formula:
1 8 ( 4 n )! [1103 + 26390 n ]
=
p 9801 n=0 ( n!)4 396 4 n
.

This work opened the way to very similar, yet more and more accurate, ways of
obtaining more and more digits of .
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A f t e rwor d
Highly Composite Numbers
During his second year in England, Ramanujan produced many more new and
original paperssome with Hardy, some that were all his own. As Hardy
described it, Ramanujans flow of original ideas showed no symptom of abate-
ment. Ramanujan worked on the distribution of prime numbers, the Riemann
hypothesis, prime factorization of integers, and more. In 1915, Ramanujan
defined a new concept: a highly composite number.
Integers are the basic building blocks of mathematics, and prime numbers are
the basic building blocks of the integers, for every integer can be broken down,
multiplicatively, uniquely as a product of primes. For example, 6=23 and
15=35 and 3, 045, 684 = 2 2 3 353 719 . Using this multiplicativity, one
can list all the divisors of a given number. The only divisor of 1 is 1. The number
2 has two divisors, namely 1 and 2. The number 12 has six divisors, namely 1, 2,
3, 4, 6, 12.
A highly composite number is one that has more divisors than any smaller
positive integer. The first few highly composite numbers are 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 24, 36,
48, 60, 120. Incidentally, one theory in the history of mathematics, proposed by
the Austrian-American scholar Otto Neugebauer, is that the Babylonians chose
base 60 for their number system because a base with a large number of divisors
makes it easier to do arithmetic. Ramanujan defined and studied these highly
composite numbers, and he studied their frequency.
Eulers Partition Numbers
Ramanujan was a pioneer in a subject that is very dear to me, that of looking at
the integers as sums rather than products. The partition numbers are the num-
bers we discussed earlier that show the number of ways in which an integer can
be broken down as a sum. To recapitulate from an earlier chapter: The equalities
3=2+1=1+1+1 illustrate that there are three ways of partitioning the num-
ber 3. Next we observe that 4=3+1=2+2=2+1+1=1+1+1+1, which shows
that there are five ways of partitioning the number 4. Repeating this process of
adding and counting for every number n defines the partition function p(n).
Thus our examples can be denoted by p(3)=3 and p(4)=5.
As we mentioned before, the partition numbers grow at an astonishing rate.
You might not think so from calculating p(10)=42, p(20)=627, and p(30)=5604.
But there are nearly four trillion ways of partitioning 200. Obviously, it would be
crazy to attempt to list all the partitions of 200 and then count them one by one.
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A f t e rwor d
And even if you could, by the time you get to 1000, you would have to deal with
p(1000)3.6167310106. Compare this with the total number of atoms in the
known universe, which is onlyat the highest estimate41081.
There must be a better way to determine such numbers.
The great Leonhard Euler studied this problem in the eighteenth century, and
he found a clever way of computing partition numbers that avoids the impossi-
ble task of counting the partitions one by one. He found a recurrence relation,
a procedure that computes these numbers in order. For example, his method
makes it possible to compute p(200) if one has prior knowledge of the numbers
p(0)=1, p(1)=1, p(2)=2,, p(199). Eulers procedure was a major improve-
ment, but it is quite cumbersome.
Ramanujan wanted a better result: he wanted a formula for the partition
numbers that would merely require plugging in for n to get p(n). Working with
Hardy, Ramanujan came close to finding such a formula. Hardy and Ramanujan
invented the circle method, a device in analytic number theory (a branch of
number theory that uses methods from mathematical analysis) that has become
one of the most important tools in mathematics, to obtain an amazing approxi-
mation for the partition numbers. They proved the asymptotic formula
1
p (n) ~ ep 2 n/3
,
4n 3
into which one can plug in for n and get back a number that is reasonably close
to the partition number p(n). Here e is Eulers number e=2.718 . This formula
predicts that there should be 199,280,895 ways of partitioning 100. It turns out
that the partition number for 100 is actually 190,569,292, which is less than five
percent below the approximate value. The HardyRamanujan formula for 500
gives a prediction that is off by less than two percent, and by 5000, their formula
is off by less than one percent. Although the asymptotic formula never gives the
exact answer, the percentage error shrinks quickly for larger and larger numbers.
After Hardy and Ramanujan produced this astonishing approximate formula, it
would be many years before significant progress would be made on the problem
of computing the partition numbers exactly.
The important innovation that Hardy and Ramanujan brought to this study
was a classic example of the field the two of them were championing: analytic
number theory. It used a very powerful continuous method, Cauchys theo-
rem, to attack a discrete problem having to do with counting.
This work drew the attention of a particularly intriguing mathematician at
Trinity named Percy Alexander MacMahon (18541929). MacMahon was
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known to everyone as Major MacMahon. The reason for this was that in the
decade before Ramanujan was born, the 1870s, MacMahon had a brilliant mili-
tary career. After graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich,
MacMahon was sent as a military officer to India, and in an interesting coinci-
dence, served in Madras. By the time Ramanujan was born, MacMahon was
back in England, first as a military officer, but later also as a mathematician,
working in the area of combinatorics.
He did so well in mathematics that in 1890, he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society (FRS), and eight years later, he retired from the military altogether
to devote himself fully to mathematics. He became very interested in partitions.
And he had an amazing skill: like John von Neumann many years later,
MacMahon was a human calculator. He could perform very complicated cal-
culations rapidly in his head.
When he met Ramanujan at Cambridge and became aware of the Hardy
Ramanujan work on partitions of numbers, Major MacMahon offered his con-
siderable calculating abilities to help the pair. He would simply compute the
number p(n) for successively larger values of n, compiling large tables of exact
values against which Ramanujan and Hardy could compare their own numbers,
which they obtained from successively improved estimates of the function that
they believed would lead to the true p(n).
Ramanujan also proved the very surprising divisibility properties discussed
earlier. Recall that he discovered that there exists an arithmetic progression all of
whose partition numbers are divisible by 5, that is, that p ( 4 + 5n ) is always a
multiple of 5. The sequence of these partition numbers begins p(4)=5, p(9)=30,
p(14)=135, p(19)=490, p(24)=1575, all multiples of 5. He also proved, as dis-
cussed earlier, a similar striking theorem for 7 and 11, namely that p(7n+5) is
always a multiple of 7, and p(11n+6) is always a multiple of 11. These statements
are now known as Ramanujans partition congruences.
Hardy and Wright state in their textbook on number theory how those arith-
metic properties of the partition counter p(n) were derived by Ramanujan:
Examining MacMahons table of p(n), [he] was led first to conjecture, and
then to prove, these striking arithmetic properties associated with the moduli
5, 7, and 11.
Hardy and Wright then present Ramanujans brilliant proofs of these theo-
rems, all of which exploit infinite series.
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The RogersRamanujan Identities
In Cambridge, Ramanujan returned to some of his earlier work from his days in
India. He revisited identities that he knew were related to the last formulas in his
first letter to Hardy, the ones that Hardy said had defeated him completely. These
are the formulas that Hardy believed had to be true because if they werent,
nobody would have had the imagination to invent them. These formulas are
close to my heart; their present-day formulation is
q q4 1
1+ + + = ,
(1 - q ) (1 - q ) (1 - q 2 ) (1 - q ) (1 - q 4 ) (1 - q6 ) (1 - q 9 )
q2 q6 1
1+ + + = .
(1 - q ) (1 - q ) (1 - q 2 ) (1 - q2 ) (1 - q3 ) (1 - q7 ) (1 - q8 )

While he was seeking to prove these identities, Ramanujan discovered that

someone else had already discovered them. It was a mathematician by the name
of Leonard James Rogers (18621933), at the University of Leeds, who also had
the prestigious distinction of being a Fellow of the Royal Society, but had the
unfortunate knack for having his work ignored by the rest of the world.
It was in 1917 that Ramanujan discovered, in an 1894 issue of the Proceedings
of the London Mathematical Society, where it had gone unnoticed for twenty-
three years, Rogerss paper on the exact same identities that he had found!
Ramanujan contacted Rogers, presumably with Hardys help, and the two men
then worked together and provided a new, joint proof of these relations, which
became known as the RogersRamanujan identities.
Unbeknownst to them, the mathematician Issai Schur (18751941), an expert
in the mathematical area called representation theory working in Berlin, proved
these same identities in 1917. The RogersRamanujan proof would appear only
two years later, in 1919.
What each of the two identities does is to give us a function, whose variable is
q, represented (for each equation) in two different ways. On the left is an infinite
sum of fractions involving the variable q, and on the right is the reciprocal of an
infinite product of terms involving q. Even Hardy, in his book on number theory
with Wright, notes that the proofs are not simple. But we can say something
about what these identities mean. Each side of the equation can be expanded as
a formal power series. To begin with, each expression in the identity is a slight
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A f t e rwor d
variation of the function f(x)=1/(1x), which we can express as a formal power

series as follows::
1
f ( x) = = 1 + x + x 2 + x 3 + x 4 + .
1- x
This is the standard geometric series that one encounters in calculus. We can
now, for example, express the left-hand side of the first identity above as follows:
q q4
1+ + + = 1 + q (1 + q + q 2 + ) + q 4 (1 + q + q 2 + ) (1 + q 2 + q 4 + ) +
(1 - q ) (1 - q ) (1 - q 2 )
= 1 + q + q 2 + q 3 + 2q 4 + 2q 5 + 3q 6 + .

And expanding the right-hand side gives exactly the same terms! The fact that
the terms match up is evidence of a theorem, but it is not a proof: how do we
know that all the terms match, right out to infinity? The actual proof in this case
requires deep ideas that involve some tricky manipulation of power series.
These two identities were the secret behind Ramanujans stunning expres-
sions, which we discussed earlier in connection with the golden ratio , which
had so astonished Hardy.
Ramanujans imagination, the like of which nobody else possessed, was that
he figured out how to use these two identities together to magically produce
examples of numbers like the golden ratio by choosing for the variable q the
crazy numbers e and e2 in his continued fraction
1
R (q) = 5 q .
q
1+
q 2
1+
q3
1+
q4
1+

Hardy didnt know, indeed nobody knew, how Ramanujan had done it.
Not only did Ramanujan figure out these numbers, it turned out that his
expressions involved only algebraic numbers, that is, numbers that are roots of
polynomial equations with integer coefficients. This is an important class of
numbers in mathematics. It includes the golden ratio , since it is a solution to
x 2 - x - 1 = 0 . In some sense, most numbers are not algebraic. The numbers e
and , for example, are not. Since algebraic numbers are relatively rare, it is
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A f t e rwor d
amazing that the two wild examples from Ramanujans first letter that defeated
Hardy completely,
p
(
R -e -p = e 5) ( 3 -f +1-f , )
2p

(
R e -2p = e 5) ( 2 +f -f , )
correspond to solutions to the single polynomial equation

x 4 - 2 x3 - 6 x 2 + 2 x +1 = 0 .
Ramanujans Tau Function
Ramanujans innocently titled paper On certain arithmetical functions is argu-

ably his most important work. The results in this paper include congruences,
which would later play a role in developing ideas that were critical to the proof
of Fermats last theorem, and it contained a conjecture that would later be proved
by Deligne in his 1974 paper for which he was awarded the Fields Medal.
Although it is too ambitious to try to explain these results in detail, it is worth-
while to see glimpses of what Ramanujan did.
Ramanujan defined a function that he denoted by the Greek letter tau (). It is
obtained by multiplying infinitely many polynomials together. Now, that is
exactly what is done on the right-hand side of the RogersRamanujan identities
shown above, where you can see an infinite product of polynomials in the
denominator. Now, the only way for such a product to make sense is for the
terms representing successively higher powers of the variable to stabilize. And
that will happen only if any given power of the variable appears in only finitely
many of the polynomials. Those conditions are satisfied by Ramanujans func-
tion. That allows us to get more and more terms of the function by multiplying
out more and more of the polynomials, as follows:
x (1 - x ) = x - 24 x 2 + 276 x 3 - + x 25 ,
24
x (1 - x ) (1 - x ) = x - 24 x + 252 x - + x
24 24
2 2 3 75
,
x (1 - x ) (1 - x ) (1 - x ) = x - 24 x + 252 x
24 24 24
2 3 2 3
- + x145 .

As one multiplies more of these polynomials, the terms at the beginning stabi-
lize. Note that the second and third polynomials share the first three terms
236
A f t e rwor d
x24x2+252x3, and every new polynomial from then on will begin with these
three terms. If we were to multiply the next polynomial, then all the polynomials
from then on would share the first four terms, and so on. In this way, Ramanujan
was able to define a single object, a power series formed by multiplying infi-
nitely many polynomials together. It is his Delta function
D ( x ) = x (1 - x ) (1 - x ) (1 - x )
24 24 24
2 3

= x - 24 x + 252 x - 1472 x + 4830 x 5 - 6048 x 6 - 16744 x 7 +.
2 3 4

The tau function is now defined on the positive integers by taking the coeffi-
cients of the Delta function in order: (1)=1, (2)=24, (3)=252, (4)=1472,
and so on.
Ramanujan proved that if p is prime, then 1p11+(p) is without exception
a multiple of 691. Here we show this for the first few small primes:
-1 - 211 + t ( 2 ) = -2073 = -3 691,

-1 - 311 + t ( 3 ) = -176896 = -28 691,
-1 - 511 + t ( 5 ) = -48823296 = -210 3 23 691.

As strange as this may seem, it turns out that this phenomenon is a prototype of
one of the deepest theories to be developed in the second half of the twentieth
century, the theory of Galois representations, a universe that was imagined by
variste Galois. How this leads to the proof of Fermats last theorem is one of the
longest and most beautiful adventures in the history of mathematics.
Ramanujan conjectured that his tau function is multiplicative, meaning that
if m and n share no common prime factors, then (mn)=(m)(n). For exam-
ple, if m=2 and n=3, then using the numbers above, we find that (2)(3)=24
252=6048=(6). Ramanujan didnt prove this conjecture; it would later be
proved by Louis Mordell, and it would go on to serve as the prototype of a
central feature of modular forms, among the most important functions cur-
rently studied today.
Finally, Ramanujan formulated a conjecture about the rate of growth of the
tau function. For every prime number p, he conjectured that 2p11/2<(p)<2p11/2.
He thus conjectured that each of these numbers is restricted to a certain range.
It shouldnt be too large or too small, and the conjecture makes precise what is
meant by large and small. This conjecture was further developed and folded
into deep conjectures in algebraic geometry formulated by Weil, which were
then proved by Deligne, earning him a Fields Medal.
237
A f t e rwor d
Ramanujan invented his function tau in his 1916 paper, and the results he
obtained seemed to be nothing more than oddities: strange-looking formulas
and conjectured inequalities. Before him, nobody would have cared about this
mathematics. It was his genius that recognized the value of these ideas, and it
was up to mathematicians of the future to recognize their importance and make
use of them. And so they did, and from the seeds that Ramanujan planted, a
magnificent garden has grown.
Ken Ono and Dev Patel rehearsing the Circle Method Scene (photo by Sam Pressman)
238

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Ken Ono

My Search for Ramanujan

ISBN 978-3-319-25566-8 ISBN 978-3-319-25568-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959483

Springer Cham Heidelberg NewYork Dordrecht London

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media

Although this book is a first-person narrative in my voice, it represents

With Erika on Maui (May 27, 2015)

Most of my current acquaintances know nothing of my past. I have done my

Makena Beach, Maui, HI

Lutherville, Maryland (19761984)

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Does this seem over the top?

My parents in 1999 (photo by

I emerged from my early childhood with the voices of my parents in my head

Ken-chan, your parents are disappointed in you. You are embarrassment.

Takasan, Tokyo (1943)

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Takasan, ca. 1935

We can say that this kind of an international meeting, which aims

and racial differences, will exert not a small influence on advancement of

Anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1940s

My fathers professional story has a happy ending, perhaps even a fairytale

In a public opinion poll published in 1950 by the Institute of Pacific Relations,

supposed to protect, me or my wicked neighbors? Why did they choose to do

That isolationism ended in 1853, when Commodore Matthew C.Perrys fleet

Ken-chan, Lutherville, Maryland (1970s)

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

multiple of p, then ap1 1 is always a multiple of p. Then he explained a proof.

Books or Bikes, Lutherville (19761984)

Despite my fond memories of working with my father on mathematics at my

Despite my admission, my parents refused to believe that I had pulled the

This isolationism also applied to our nonexistent spiritual lives. Although my

My fathers famous paper in the Annals of Mathematics

As a sophomore, I also struggled with my identity as one of the few Asians in

To pay for this expensive sport, I worked part-time at Valley Pharmacy as a

Goofing off before a race

Lutherville, Maryland (April 7, 1984)

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Janaki Ammals letter

Janaki Ammal in 1987

I ask, Whos this guy Ramanujan? What did he do?

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Kumbakonam, India (1890s)

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Map of South India (drawn by Aspen Ono)

Ramanujans mother, Komalatammal

Ramanujans father was rarely homeleaving early in the morning and

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Government College, Ramanujan continued to perform amazingly well in math-

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Carrs book contained 6165 theorems and mathematical formulas, beginning

repeated itself: Ramanujan excelled beyond expectations in mathematicseas-

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Ramanujan had a pleasant personality. He was uncommonly likeable and

Several years ago, a nephew of mine perfectly innocent of mathematical

Los Angeles (1993)

Urbana andPrinceton (19941997)