Akram Khan on Srinivasa Ramanujan

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

In 1914, a self-taught Mathematics student named Ramanujan left India for Trinity College Cambridge. Here, alongside the celebrated English mathematician GH Hardy, he completed some extraordinary work on Pi and prime numbers. What was even more extraordinary was that he couldn't prove a lot of his work, and attributed many of his theories to a higher power. For the renowned UK choreographer Akram Khan, there is a beauty in patterns and maths, and he sees Ramanujan's genius as a clash between Eastern and Western cultures. Together with presenter Matthew Parris, he explores the mathematician's life. Guest Professor Robin Wilson, who once visited Ramanujan's home, takes them through some of the maths, and explains why you'll never look at the number 1729 in the same way again. Producer: Toby Field. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2017.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Great Lives is a Download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.
0:05.0	Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk of the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only
0:15.4	£20 per annum.
0:17.4	I am now about 23 years of age.
0:20.4	I have had no university education, but I have undergone the ordinary school course.
0:25.0	After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at mathematics.
0:31.0	I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a university
0:36.6	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
0:47.0	are termed by the local mathematicians as startling.
0:51.0	That letter dated 16th of January 1913, was written by our subject today,
0:57.0	Trinivasa Romanum to G. Hardy in Trinity College at Cambridge, and as well well here it was the beginning of an
1:04.6	extraordinary partnership that as far-reaching consequences in mathematics and
1:09.5	beyond. Choosing Ramanjan is the internationally renowned award-winning choreographer Akram Khan, associate artist
1:18.0	at Sadler's Wells and The Cove Theatre in Leicester and who performed at the opening of the London Olympics.
1:24.0	The world of maths, Akram, men shut away in dusty universities doing complicated calculation
1:30.0	seems like a million miles away from dance, movement and choreography.
1:34.7	What made you pick, Ramanajan?
1:37.0	Well, actually, Ramanajan was someone that my mother had mentioned when I was a child and she constantly spoke about him because my mother's father,
1:46.7	my grandfather who I never met was a bit of a genius in mathematics.
1:50.6	He won two gold medals in India and he created his own theories which they still study today
1:56.4	and so the whole community that I grew up with or that I came into the world knowing the Bangladeshi community who moved to London constantly
2:07.0	looked at me as if perhaps you're the next mathematical genius because it had obviously skipped my mother because she went into literature and she was very good at literature and it's funny what it does to you when a whole community around you start to believe in something that is definitely not true but at the time
	...

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