DAVID LEAVITT:
Srinivasa Ramanujan
was a great genius,
a great mathematician.
He was born in 1887
in the province
of Tamil Nadu in India.
He was fascinated by numbers.
"Numbers," he said,
"had personalities" for him.
WILLIAM HENRY:
What's amazing about
Ramanujan's theories
is that today they form
the basis for astrophysics
and also black hole studies as
well as artificial intelligence.
Nobody was talking about any
of these subjects in the 1920s.
LEAVITT:
One of the most
fascinating aspects
of Ramanujan as a mathematician,
was the visionary element
in his work.
He always insisted, and he was
very adamant about this,
that the mathematical
discoveries he made
came to him
in dreams and visions
provided by
the goddess Namagiri.
Namagiri, historically,
was the consort of a god
whose emblem was drops of blood
and so sometimes, he said,
the formulae, the calculations,
the numbers were written
in drops of blood.
He often talked about how,
in these visions,
he would see these fantastic,
beautiful mathematical formulae
unscrolling before him.
LAYNE LITTLE:
It's interesting to note
that many of the equations
in the early notebooks
of Ramanujan were actually
a particular kind of equation
called "magical squares."
Magical squares
have an interesting
function in Hinduism.
They're actually used
to invoke a particular deity.
It's understood
that certain deities
can be embodied
or represented in numbers,
and that these magical squares
have the power
to generate the presence
of that deity.
When we look at the stories
of these visionaries,
especially mathematical
visionaries who are guiding
our advanced science
and physics today,
you see a common denominator.
They have dreams of otherworldly
beings, divine beings,
even extraterrestrials,
and it appears
that these otherworldly beings
are guiding humanity
into a new age
of super-advanced technology
that will ultimately allow us
to interface with the cosmos.
