UNITED STATES, September 4, 2007: For his 12th novel The Indian Clerk, David Leavitt, one of America’s distinguished writers, chose to work on the relationship between mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Leavitt, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and professor of literature, offers a complicated and intriguing story starting with Hardy receiving a letter filled with prime number theorems from Ramanujan, a young accounts clerk in Chennai. Hardy and his collaborator J. E. Littlewood soon decide Ramanujan is a genius and invite him to work with them. The book explores the difficult relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan, and the various indignities and health problems the Indian genius suffered, leading to an avoidable tragedy. Ramanujan said his mathematical formulae came to him as visions provided by a goddess. Leavitt says, “This way of conceptualizing mathematics was anathema to Hardy, who considered himself an atheist. Hardy had trouble in accepting that possibility, even though Ramanujan actually perceived a mystic connection between his mathematics and his religion. In other words, Hardy persisted in arguing that Ramanujan just claimed to be devout to please his family but in fact he was a rationalist and much more like Hardy. But that is something I think very few people believed except for Hardy.”
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