Fields Medal-winner Manjul Bhargava on how music moves his mathematics, ‘fringe’ science, and his current obsession: a biopic on the maths legend, S. Ramanujan.

Last week, Chemistry Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan castigated the Indian Science Congress as a “circus” and swore to never attend it. This is 41-year-old Princeton mathematician Manjul Bhargava’s second consecutive visit and he hopes he can make it next year too. “I hear it’s going to be in Chennai and I could attend the music festival and then the Congress,” says the Indian-origin American, who’s also a concert-level tabla player.

Music weaves itself into Dr. Bhargava’s metier and frequently puts him into a “meditative, creative state” and has helped him work on ideas that led to the 2014 Fields Medal, one of two mathematics prizes that are considered equivalent to the Nobel. An integral part of the way he does mathematics is to visualise a problem and sometimes translate the ‘x’ and ‘y’s of algebra into the curves and spheres of geometry. He once re-imagined a century-old algebraic technique, laid out by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, in the language of a Rubik’s Cube. The work that paved his way to a Fields Medal also deals intimately with the solutions of specific kinds of algebraic equations, that when drawn on a graph, are known as elliptic or hyperelliptic curves.

From maths to movies



This year, however, Dr. Bhargava is keen about a new kind of visualisation: bringing to the movie screen the life and mathematics of Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar, the enigmatic mathematician from colonial Madras, who worked almost entirely in isolation until he was ‘discovered’ by Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy. The Man Who Knew Infinity, directed by Matthew Brown, stars among others Dev Patel — as Ramanujan— and Jeremy Irons as Hardy and is based on Robert Kanigel’s biography that goes by the same name as the movie.

Dr. Bhargava served as associate producer on the project and — four directors and several year later — is happy that the movie is faithful to the book and evocatively livens the events of Ramanujan’s life: his struggle with poverty, his approach to mathematics, the challenge of adapting to cold England from balmy Madras, racism, the influence of his work on contemporary maths and physics, and his untimely death at age 32. “Each director had his own vision,” says Dr. Bhargava, “Hollywood needs its love scenes and there was pressure on the director (Brown) to show Ramanujan as having an affair with a white nurse. That would be entirely made up. None of us were happy about that. His story is dramatic enough. Why not tell it the way it was?”

At film festivals in Toronto, Zurich and Goa where the movie has been screened, Dr. Bhargava says the reaction has been “fantastic” and beyond industry expectations. At the Indian Science Congress in Mysuru, he presented a trailer of the movie as a finale to a popular lecture on the flavour of Ramanujan’s mathematics and was soon mobbed by a horde of students for autographs. In fact, his clamouring fans swelled to proportions large enough for the organisers to spirit him away — twice in two days amidst police security — and sequester him in a room for a good half hour. Such a response, reckons Dr. Bhargava, wasn’t just specific to India — he’d seen it in South Korea and other Asian countries and says it “probably had to do with the movie trailer”.

The larger lesson from Ramanujan’s life, Dr. Bhargava says, is that talent can come from anywhere and parents, governments and scientists have a duty to ensure that those who are passionate about their work — whether it’s science, engineering or arts (and for Bhargava maths is “arts”, not science) — should be allowed to pursue it and be led by where their talent takes them. “Ramanujan’s maths was almost… from outer space,” characterises Bhargava, “We mathematicians sometimes wonder how he may have turned out if he was better taken care of, nurtured and fed.”

Sum of all parts



For his part, Dr. Bhargava highly values the role of a supportive family and their early encouragement to pursue his interests. His grandfather, a Sanskrit scholar, maintained books on ancient mathematical techniques and his mother too was a mathematician. “In the U.S., I’d frequently be bored with school and my mother would let me miss school and spend months in Jaipur with my grandfather. There was as much history, stories, Sanskrit, music as well as maths that I learnt there,” he reminisces.

Though primarily based at Princeton University, Dr. Bhargava is now associated with several other Indian universities — the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, the University of Hyderabad, Chennai Mathematical Institute — and co-ordinates an initiative called GIAN (Global Initiative of Academic Networks) to get Nobel laureates and researchers, from around the world and regarded as the best in their fields, to spend time at Indian colleges teaching and interacting with students. “Somebody who’s extremely talented in mathematics shouldn’t have to forcibly go into engineering for the lack of institutions,” is how he describes his motive around these initiatives.

Science and speculation



Perhaps Ramanujan’s struggle to find an audience for his work and the hardship he underwent to be taken seriously by the mathematics establishment of his time informs Dr. Bhargava’s relatively tolerant take on the inclusion of sessions on ancient Indian science in the proceedings of the Indian Science Congress. Last year, an ex-pilot made the apocryphal claim that an ancient Indian sage had laid down detailed plans of ancient airplanes; this year, too, a bureaucrat successfully submitted in the environmental sciences sub-conference a ‘research paper’ on how Lord Shiva was a “great environmentalist” — though he didn’t go on to present it.

To Dr. Bhargava, this is “fringe” science, though he adds that it’s in the very nature of science congresses the world over to occasionally entertain speculative claims and “fringe” science. The key, according to him, is that fringe science be treated as such and not be given greater space than actual scientific discussions or talks. “I was upset at the last Congress [in Mumbai] that the fantastic achievements of the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) were barely covered in the media and all space was taken up by those discussions. Real scientists there were wondering, ‘Hey, what about us?’” he says. Moreover, he adds, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), there were always claims that someone had solved the Riemann hypothesis [a bedevilling maths problem, nearly a century old, whose solving guarantees a million dollars in prize money from the Clay Mathematics Institute]. On the other hand, the solution to another tricky problem — of rapidly testing whether a given number was prime — was proffered by an Indian computer scientist, Manindra Agrawal and his two graduate students. “They are computer scientists and not professional mathematicians. Imagine if their work wasn’t accepted at an ICM… solutions can from anywhere,” he reasons, “Science marches ahead when as many ideas are allowed to be communicated.”

jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in