NARRATOR: Emory
University, Atlanta,
Georgia, December 2012.
After years of work,
mathematician Ken Ono
and two of his former students
come up with a groundbreaking
mathematical formula
that will allow
scientists to study black
holes in an entirely new way.
Incredibly, they
achieved this feat
by studying a single
paragraph written
by an Indian mathematician
over nine decades earlier,
Srinivasan Ramanujan.
DAVID WILCOCK:
Srinivasan Ramanujan
was an Indian mathematician
who is unlike any other genius
in world history.
Ramanujan's work has
now formed the basis
for superstring theory and
multidimensional physics.
Some of the most
advanced math that all
the high-end scientists
are still using today
is called modular functions,
which could lead to time
travel, antigravity,
limitless free energy, all
of this futuristic technology.
He was able to
take a little that he
knew farther than
most mathematicians
would be able to take them.
He had the vision to
see what was important.
There are just so many
beautiful ideas that he had,
some of which are just
waiting to be developed.
NARRATOR: Ramanujan
made breakthroughs
in integral calculus which can
be used to determine the drag
force buffeting a
wing as it slides
through the air or the
gravitational effects of the
Earth on a man-made satellite.
But perhaps what
is most noteworthy
is that Ramanujan
insisted these baffling
theorems were not simply the
product of his own genius.
He claimed they were
communicated to him
by an other-worldly being.
Srinivasan Ramanujan
was born in Erode, India
on December 22, 1887 and was
considered a miracle child
because he was the only one
of his mother's four children
to survive infancy.
Even as a young boy, he
was obsessed with numbers.
From a very early
age, just instinctively
he was thinking about numbers.
He was calculating.
He was fascinated by numbers.
Numbers, he said, had
personalities for him,
that they had a kind
of life for him.
There are a lot of stories
about how he was so focused
on mathematics that
he would ignore
a lot of his other subjects.
NARRATOR: Ramanujan grew up
in the town of Kumbakonam
in a house within view of the
impressive Sarangapani Temple.
The mathematical prodigy
spent much of his childhood
at the temple among thousands
of carvings of Hindu gods.
According to Ramanujan's
childhood friend,
he would often go to the
temple and work on mathematics.
His friend had a memory
of coming into the temple
and finding Ramanujan with
all these inexplicable figures
surrounding him.
NARRATOR: The figures that
surrounded Ramanujan were,
in fact, complex
mathematical equations
that he had written
in chalk on the stone
slabs of the temple floor.
He would often
say that they were
communicated to
him in his dreams
by the Hindu goddess
Namagiri Thayar.
He always insisted-- and he
was very adamant about this--
that the mathematical
discoveries he made
came to him in
dreams and visions
provided by the
goddess Namagiri.
In these visions, he would
see these fantastic, beautiful
mathematical formulae
unscrolling before him.
NARRATOR: Numerous times
throughout Ramanujan's youth
he would abruptly vanish
for days at a time,
then return home
without explanation.
His neighbors considered
him to be psychic,
and he suggested that
numbers connect us to higher
powers in the universe.
Could it be that
Ramanujan really
was receiving information
from an other-worldly being?
