Ramanujan and Hardy Featured on the London Stage

September 21, 2007

The story of the remarkable collaboration between Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy is on the London stage — at the Barbican — this fall.

Titled A Disappearing Number, the play comes from the theater group Complicite. Its artistic director, Simon McBurney, the son of a Cambridge professor, was inspired to present the story after reading Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. The book "wasn't just about mathematics, but about the nature of imagination," McBurney told The Times. He discovered that "great mathematicians worked through an extraordinary sense of instinct and intuition and, above all, imagination — that mathematics was created, throughout history, by leaps of imagination."

Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy is the play's consultant. His popular book, The Music of the Primes, prompted McBurney to invite him aboard. Mathematics, said du Sautoy, "doesn't exist if you don't prove it. Ramanujan was much more interested in making discoveries and not giving justifications. He would make these amazing connections between formulas, and Hardy could see they were right, but couldn't understand how Ramanujan had got there."

Ramanujan and Hardy made breakthroughs in the field of partition numbers. "The partition number of five is the number of different ways I can group five stones," du Sautoy said. "There are seven ways to partition them." Hardy, he said, "believed you could never get a formula for it. Ramanujan felt there should be one. Together, they came up with a ridiculously complicated formula that involves every function of the two millennia we've been doing maths. They made many discoveries, but that was their most stunning piece of proof."

McBurney has used the story of their work on partition numbers as a jumping off point to explore what he called the "larger metaphorical application of what it implies, of how creativity consumes you — how it's an extraordinarily human activity, this absolute compulsion to understand, but at the same time this compulsion to understand can have tragic consequences."

Also just out is David Leavitt's book The Indian Clerk: A Novel, a fictionalized account of the unlikely partnership between Hardy and Ramanujan. In the tale, the pair attempt to prove the Riemann hypothesis.

Source: The Times, Aug. 20, 2007; The Times, Sept. 2, 2007; Newsweek, Aug. 21, 2007.