Genius at work

Watching the genius at work is a sheer treat of eye. And, no doubt, a confession of another genius about that, is even better. After this, if the first genius is Srinivasan Ramanujan, and the second one is G. H. Hardy, there is hardly any space left for more awe.

Complicite, the british group, performed their play “A Disappearing Number” in Mumbai, which revolves around “A Mathematician’s Apology” by G. H. Hardy, wrote about Srinivasan Ramanujan, the mathematical genius from India, and, most probably, the most talented mathematician world ever faced.

That was all about mathematics, and yet, it has got nothing to do with maths. Ramanujan devoted his short span of life towards the development of series, divergence, convergence, and continuum of numbers, and, surprisingly this play also engrosses itself into the continuum and gives you the feel of being in the infinite domain of infinity which has probably no starting or ending point, rather, no points altogether. The whole play is constructed in a way as if it evolves from the theory of infinity, and finally takes the audience to the trans state of infinite space where you can find around yourself nothing but mathematics, the reality of mathematics rather than the abstractness of it.

The performance put up by the best of the professionals in this business is surely a life time experience where starting from the set design, the art direction, the flawless performance, the artistic height it achieves, and the relation of our life with mathematics is perfectly in ultimate continuum. You cannot separate your daily activities starting from your phone number to your philosophy from mathematics, and this is the point they made. No doubt, this can be made no better. Who could ever imagine that a relationship between two human beings can be expressed in terms of the convergent series of 1+1/2+1/4+1/8+… added up to infinity which reaches to 2? The beauty of life, and the strongest truth of life is probably this that this series never reaches 2, but at every step it gets a bit closer to it, and this is all about out life, goal, achievement, ambition, emotion and living.

Apart from the mastery in the content the play presented to us, it showed us, what a production should be, ideally. The concept of new media is exhausted up to it last drop to create this play a lifetime watch. You will experience yourself in a Chennai taxi, and believe me, you can not feel anything else when you are there. The movement of time and space, the change of set environment with a tap of a finger, the change of era, and change of mentality, the movement from ultimate understanding to mythical belief, from genius to dumb, is all done with that continued sense of continuum, where you really would never be able to separate one from the other. You would have no other choice than to submit yourself to the mathematical reality, the reality that the series never reaches its goal but can only get closer in every step.

Ramanujan died at the age of 33 from tuberculosis. The death of Ramanujan had probably delayed the development of mathematics to some 100 years, but the legacy remained unaltered. Still Hardy’s are born who are too much meticulous about proofs of everything, and till date, they continue to be astonished by witnessing the sheer power of imagination, like Ramanujan told, “It just came to my mind, can you please check if it is true or not?” The course of mathematics is also a continuum, which cannot be marked into discrete theorems and lemmas, but can be extended from upanishada’s shlokas to birth control pills, and is to be learnt with the expense of your life, like any artform. Mathematics is much more an art than science, and Ramanujan was much more a magician than a mathematician, maybe.