Ramanujan inspired opera, plays: Prof Alladi

In a lecture titled ‘Stage productions on Ramanujan a comparison”, held at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation to mark his 130 birth anniversary, he spoke of the connections that Ramanujan made between completely different fields and analysed how each of these creative productions had depicted his life and work.

Prof Krishnaswami Alladi spoke about how the opera “Partition” that premiered in April 1998, placed ‘too little emphasis on the joy that Ramanujan felt while he made his discoveries.

In the play titled ‘A first class man’, which had been staged in 2003, there was a scene that portrays the attempted suicide of Ramanujan falling under a train while he was at England.

He was subsequently arrested by a Scottish policeman. However, his associate Dr GH Hardy comes to Ramanujan’s rescue saying Ramanujan was a member of the Royal Mathematical Society’.

However, at the time of the suicide, Ramanujan was not yet a member of the Royal but going to be one. While the play portrays Ramanujan as solely responsible for establishing many of the equations, in reality, Hardy intervened to establish theorems.

The movie, ‹The man who knew infinity›, according to Prof Alladi Krishnaswami was the most accurate and compelling version of Ramanujan’s life, based on the book on the same title.

A positive idea the film brings out is the beauty of mathematics. However, the movie portrayed the British as being dismissive of Indians, which was not the case. The famous taxi number incident time was also shown differently in the film. ‘’Overall, Ramanujan’s mathematics is so startling, that it invokes both awe and admiration, the world over....every number was a friend of Ramanujan, Prof Alladi added.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof Swaminathan, praising Prof Alladi, said his greatest contribution to mathematics was to instill a love for this subject in his students.

Due to his annual visit every December, it becomes the month of music and mathematics, he said.