(mysterious music)
Ramanujan was an astonishing mathematician
who left behind thousands of mathematical formulas.
He was a two time college dropout
who was born in South India in the late 19 century.
He believed at his goddess, a Hindu goddess named Namagiri.
He believed that Namagiri would just
offer him formulas as gifts
which she ended up recording in his notebooks.
Ramanujan, he might as well have been living in a desert.
Nobody around him understood anything that he wrote down.
So in desperation, he ended up writing some
of the most distinguished mathematicians in Western Europe.
And one of these mathematicians was G.H. Hardy.
Hardy discovered together with his colleague,
John Littlewood, that Ramanujan had to be a genius,
at least a genius in terms of imagination and creativity.
So, Hardy arranged for the most extraordinary fellowship
to attend perhaps one of the two or three
best universities on the planet, Cambridge.
But over time, Hardy began to see that Ramanujan
truly was someone who could make fundamental advances
to how mathematics should be done.
Hundreds of his formulas have ended up serving as prototypes
for theories that the mathematicians
of the 20th and 21st century have gone on to develop;
the study of black holes, mathematics of the Internet,
even the mathematics that power your phone.
How he intuited these formulas?
I don't know and how he anticipated with the future
of mathematics and physics would be is beyond me.
There's a spiritual element to all of that.
What if Ramanujan had not written out to Hardy?
Or what if Hardy had not responded and noticed glimpses
of genius in that first letter he wrote?
Well that's a world I cannot fathom
(calm piano music)
Future of society depends on good science.
We need those minds that propel science forward.
We're not short of people
who can solve differential equations
that are taught at the best schools.
What we are short of are the next generation
of Einsteins, Newtons and Ramanujan.
Genius cannot be taught, it can only be nurtured.
The Spirit of Ramanujan Math Talent Initiative
is a global search.
We had this idea of the strong belief
that genius exists and resides all over the world,
that we should use the story of Ramanujan
to search for this talent.
Young people with great promise,
they are often outliers, they're often so, so far ahead
of their classes that the teachers
don't know what to do with them.
We want to be the Hardy for, for those brilliant students
who are working in isolation.
It's our way of paying forward
the wonderful things that have happened to us.
If you slide this loop down just a bit
you end up with a shape like this.
And then, you can untwist that loop right there.
I was always a studious kid, I liked school
and math (mumbles), I didn't feel
one way or another about it.
I considered myself to be more of a humanities person
and in the ninth grade when I had my first class
with Katherine Socha, it was really interesting
and the types of math that we were doing.
I really enjoyed doing combinatorics with her.
You can tell when somebody brings
a kind of joy to their work.
There's a willingness to fail,
to be wrong, to try again, to persist.
Now I do math, I'm doing it because
I want to solve the problem.
When I was in Katherine's class
the point wasn't to learn math
so that you could get an A in the test.
The point was to understand the new concept
and see the world in a different way.
Kendall really seems to have enjoyed
puzzling things out for herself.
She does not wanna be told the answer.
She doesn't wanna be told a solution strategy
or given lots of hints.
(calm instrumental music)
I had her work through a set
of classical problems in graph theory.
For two months on an impossible problem
and she did it, she worked everyday
on this problem for two months.
And then finally, with a few guiding questions from me
and from some of my colleagues,
she proved that it was actually impossible
and that's delightful.
It was two months, it's a really long time.
I would take some time in class and work on it by myself.
I'd work a little bit at home.
I just kind of wanted to see what the answer was.
That's remarkable for a young student
to persist so long on something
that they don't know how to do
and to try different strategies
rather than to, to spin their wheels
over and over and over in the same strategy.
That works (mumbles)
Under, this also works.
I think math is beautiful just in the idea
that you can use it as the means of exploration
and discovery of the world around you
and in terms of understanding how
you as a person solve problems that it's,
it's even a method of self-discovery and I would argue
that that's really crucial to somebody's development.
I love the satisfaction of finally finishing
a problem after so much hard work.
Math is probably the most pure subject
out of all of the sciences and that really interests me.
Everything is all logical and it's easy
to understand once you get the concepts
and that's what drew me to math in the first place.
It's everywhere, nature, all around us,
the golden ratio, fibonacci sequence.
Everything is always interconnected.
There's always something left to learn.
There's always something left to know
and just the way that there's no end to it.
(piano music)
So I first met Dean
in my advanced math class here at Emory
This little boy is sitting in the front seat,
that's two or three years ago,
it's not like you're very big yet, next to your mom.
Your legs are swinging under the seats like that
and I started lecturing I think about
Fermat's last theorem, no, Fermat's little theorem I think
and as it's typical in a class that I would teach.
I like to ask questions to the class,
right, the class wants to participate.
But within 15 minutes, like nobody wanted to participate
which is unusual for my class
because Dean is answering all the questions.
Who is this boy whose hands go up immediately
answering all the questions?
So that's how I first met Dean
and I've never seen anything like that before in my life
and I've been a professor for almost 30 years.
An answer means like it's done
and it implies that there's nothing else to be done,
but there's always something else to be done.
So I think the question is way more important
because even if it's not answered it can lead
to many other (mumbles) many other important theorems
like the Riemann hypothesis's just a question.
It hasn't been answered yet.
What he exhibited there is more than youthful enthusiasm.
It's the ability to see where the research leads
which is the kind of questions that I'm trying to ask
to cultivate my students and he was basically
on fire then and he still is.
Ramanujan defined this function called Delta
which is equal to q times its infinite product
with minus q to the end of the 24th.
I'm the son of a mathematician
and so as a young boy, I didn't know that there were
any other occupations other than being a mathematician.
Mathematics I feel it is being
much closer to poetry and music
and what we look for are patterns and numbers
which often end up becoming the model
for patterns in the universe
and that deep intricate structure
makes you have to believe that there's something
very spiritual going on underlying how the universe
and how numbers are required to behave.
By the time I was in middle school,
I actually didn't really like mathematics.
It seemed like a chore.
I didn't become passionate about mathematics
almost until my early 20s.
In graduate school, in the early 1990s,
a book came out called The Man Who Knew Infinity.
It's great book about Ramanujan
and I fell in love with the story.
Ramanujan is, he's a legend of mathematics.
He created all of his formulas all on his own
and that really inspires me because if he can do it
maybe I can aspire to be (mumbles)
and create some of the things
that he did like a number theory.
(happy music)
The experience of sort of moving forward
and accelerating my track in mathematics
has led me to believe that challenging yourself
is more important than taking the easy road.
We don't manufacture genius.
Society can only lose genius because genius is tend to be
outliers, people who don't fit in
and I think the program such as the Spirit of Ramanujan
will go someway to first detecting genius and then nurturing
these young students all over the world
so that they know that their gifts can be
potentially put to good use in the future.