THE BOY STOOD IN FRONT OF THE SCREEN, bending and waving his arms as a crowd of onlookers shouted encouragement. On the screen, a coracle swerved through an animated projection of the Cauvery River, sensing his movement through a sensor embedded in the floor.
A question popped up on the screen: “Which of these is a multiple of three?” On either side of the screen, an answer appeared. As everyone shouted their choice, the boy bent decisively to his left. His friends cheered as the boat struck the right answer and continued on its route.
“Kids always learn this game faster,” Syed Fawaz Ahmed told me with a smile. “It takes time for the adults.”
The game is the centrepiece of an exhibition at Bangalore’s Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, celebrating the life of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose 125th birth anniversary was celebrated across the world in 2012. The virtual boat exhibit was a depiction of Ramanujan’s childhood in the village of Kumbakonam, long before he baffled mathematicians with his unconventional leaps of intuition, and opened up entire new fields of research with his notebooks full of scribbled equations.
I took a walk through the exhibition on a Sunday afternoon last month, along with Ahmed and Chayan Deb, two of its designers and former students of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. “The curator of the museum visited our college and saw our work,” Ahmed explained. “He was very interested and told us that he wanted to showcase Ramanujan’s life and mathematics.” Once they had graduated, the designers were to create the show for the museum, where it will remain till the middle of February.
Ahmed, Deb and their partner Nikhil Joshi immersed themselves in Ramanujan’s life, reading biographies, meeting mathematicians and poring over century-old documents at the University of Madras to put together a fitting celebration of one of the most intriguing figures in mathematical history.
Though the exhibition is tucked away on the third floor, we found it buzzing with excited children and adults. Visitors move in a circular path around the room, tall white panels on either side telling Ramanujan’s story with cartoon illustrations. Stylised representations of the life cycle of a butterfly accompany young Ramanujan as he voraciously devours mathematical knowledge, caterpillar-like, only to find himself stifled by social and educational expectations.
As I walked I found myself sympathising with the disappointed young man in the cartoons, regretting the system that refused him a college degree because his obsession led him to fail in subjects other than mathematics. But then the mathematician GH Hardy—whose bronze bust decorates the centre of the room—took the struggling Ramanujan under his wing, bringing him to England to work, and ensuring that he received the attention he deserved; in the exhibition, this period is depicted with the butterfly taking flight.
After five years in England, Ramanujan’s frail constitution and obsessive pursuit of his work led to a decline in his health; he returned to India and died soon after, at the age of 32. But the exhibition steers clear of this tragic aspect of his life. “That’s the conception we wanted to break,” Ahmed explained. “Ramanujan lived a full life and did more than anybody else could in 32 years. To people who are passionate about what they do, all troubles are secondary.”
The public seem to share Ahmed and Deb’s enthusiasm for Ramanujan—the show sees over 5,000 visitors a day. “Ramanujan rocks!” is one of the comments scrawled in the visitors’ book.
The exhibition reinforces the fact that Ramanujan remains an enigma. Apart from his own letters, almost every panel presents an outsider’s view of him. One quotes his school principal calling him a prodigy, another describes how his classmates stood in respectful awe of him. Further ahead in the show, some mathematicians dismiss Ramanujan as a fraud; one doesn’t dare to look at Ramanujan’s notebooks fearing that he would never think of anything else. Many consider him a mystic, ascribing his genius to visions sent by his family goddess. A century later, no one can truly say how the young man from Kumbakonam had such unparalleled insight into the nature of the universe.
Fawaz has his own opinion. “I feel that he was just a normal guy who was interested in mathematics,” he told me confidently. “Everyone is capable of reaching the level that Ramanujan did.”