My Search for Ramanujan

by Ken Ono

  He was the leader of the Göttingen collective of mathematicians. His students and collaborators included many famous mathematicians, including Alonzo Church, Erich Hecke, Emmy Noether, Hermann Weyl, Ernst Zermelo, and John von Neumann. At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, Hilbert put forth a list of twenty-three of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. That list served as a guide for much of twentieth-century mathematical research. It is considered the most successful and influential list of problems ever assembled. Mathematicians spent the last century working on those problems, and along the way, they developed an extraordinarily rich trove of important mathematical ideas and techniques.

  My father treasured the Hilbert audiotape; it remains one of his prized possessions. It was exciting to watch my father as he listened to Hilbert’s lecture, even though I didn’t understand a single word. He’d close his eyes as he listened, doing his best, I supposed, to imagine himself in the lecture hall. For my father, the tape represented an important historical event, one that he felt was as momentous as the famous 1877 phonograph recording of Thomas Edison reciting the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb.

  The role of mathematics in my early childhood was not confined to our home. I was identified by Julian Stanley, a famous psychologist at Johns Hopkins, as an uncommonly talented kid. Stanley was an advocate for the accelerated education of academically gifted children. I was one of the children he studied in his well-known “Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth,” a longitudinal survey of children who scored 700 or higher on the SAT math test before the age of thirteen—thereby putting them among the top one percent of those taking the test. Enrolled in his study, I took the SAT several times before the end of middle school. I was in sixth grade when I scored over 700 on the SAT math section on my first try. Thanks to that study, I was offered a scholarship, which I declined, to attend Towson State University the following year.

  That is how my life went in elementary school. My mother handled the day-to-day parenting, and my father, while emotionally detached and consumed with his mathematics, found a way to offer me love and affection through our common bond of mathematics. I excelled in elementary school, and I enjoyed my notoriety as the smart math kid.

  Books or Bikes, Lutherville (1976–1984)

  Despite my fond memories of working with my father on mathematics at my little kiddie desk, I actually never wanted to be a mathematician. That wasn’t the life I wanted; it was the life that others had worked out for me. I had enjoyed the label as a gifted math student in elementary school, but as I got older, I wanted to be more like all the other kids in the neighborhood, and they weren’t doing math for fun with their fathers. I just wanted to hang out, play baseball, and go to the movies.

  As a middle-school pupil, the numbers I appreciated were to be found not in mathematics books, but on baseball cards. I was a dedicated collector of Topps cards, and I put my math skills to use in studying the statistics about the players depicted on those cards. To this day, I remember a bunch of odd baseball statistics. For example, the number 388 reminds me of the cherubic face of Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twin who compiled a league-leading batting average of .388 in 1977, the year he magically approached the elusive .400 barrier, which has not been breached since Hall of Famer Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941.

  I dreamt of a life as a NASA astronaut. In middle school, I collected glossy pictures of Apollo moon missions, writing dozens of letters to NASA requesting the photos. Carl Sagan, the creator and star of the TV show Cosmos, was my hero. I read his books, even the ones I had no chance of understanding. I was very good at math, and I was confident that this meant that I could become a scientist like Carl Sagan.

  Around seventh grade, an awkward age for most boys, I began, like other boys, to struggle with my identity. Everyone’s struggle is unique; this was mine: A late bloomer, I was the shortest kid in class. I wore glasses, which was not fashionable in 1980. I was the only Asian kid in my class. That was already three strikes against me. But above all, without the maturity to understand that I was trapped between two cultures, the negative parental voices in my head started becoming more and more insistent:Ken-chan, you small and weak … You no fit in … You must be best math student … You cannot afford people think you stupid … There is no other way.

  Although my father was largely absent as a parent, I was aware of his opinions and concerns regarding me. I learned about them from the conversations I overheard between my parents. My parents frequently talked about us in private, and in our house, which had very thin walls and doors, very few conversations were actually private. Of course, I didn’t understand what they were saying, since they were speaking Japanese, but I heard my name, so I understood that they were talking about me, and from their intonation, I could infer that they were worried.

  When my mother would speak with me following such a conversation, I was annoyed and confused, for it seemed as though my mother was merely the messenger for a higher power. When she criticized me, I always wondered whether she was expressing her own opinion, or whether perhaps she did not really think so disparagingly of me and was simply repeating the edicts handed down by my father. I felt his power over me as an invisible and omnipotent judge, and I began to crave his praise even more for my accomplishments, which however good they might be, were never good enough.

  When my father occasionally descended from the clouds for some hands-on parenting, it usually meant that I had done something that merited punishment. If he had to take time from his important mathematical research, then the stakes had to be quite high, and I had to be ready for substantial consequences. Such incidents were rare, but I recall one time when he beat me severely.

  When I was twelve years old and in sixth grade at the Hampton Elementary School, I had the privilege of helping out as an office assistant. I was allowed to lend a hand in preparing announcements and to help out in other ways in the school office. The office was a suite of three rooms whose entryway opened into a waiting room where the receptionist had her desk. Connected to that room was the principal’s office, which I thought of as a torture chamber: kids went there only when they were in trouble. Then there was the copy room, a debris field of slotted mailboxes, stacks of reams of paper, large rolls of construction paper, and a spirit duplicator, generally known as a Ditto machine.

  In the late 1970s, Ditto machines were enjoying their last hurrah before the xerographic copiers that we know today took over. The Ditto machine was a low-volume duplicator that used alcohol-based inks and a “master original” that could be either handwritten or typewritten. The master was a two-ply affair whose top sheet was the one that was written or typed on, and whose second sheet was covered in a layer of wax impregnated with ink, usually purple. After the top sheet had been written or typed on, it was removed, and the waxy sheet, which now contained an imprint of what had been written on the top sheet, would be placed on the drum in the printer. Each turn of a crank produced a copy. Compared to the photocopiers of today, which spew out limitless copies at the push of a button, those Ditto machines were a pain, and they were messy if you didn’t know what you were doing.

  The principal of Hampton, Mrs. May C. Robinson, was a strict and awe-inspiring executive. That spring, Hampton came under threat of closure. School budgets were tight, and closing Hampton was proposed as a way to save money. Mrs. Robinson leaped to the defense of her school. She prepared a carefully handwritten letter on a master ditto that asked parents to support the school by protesting the proposed closure. She requested that they sign the letter and return it to the school to show their support for her petition to keep Hampton open. Alone in the copy room, I discovered the spirit master, and in an act of stupid mischief whose obvious consequences I somehow failed to foresee, I vandalized the letter. On the line intended for the parents’ signatures, I wrote “GLORY! Close the fucking school.”

  Actually, I loved Hampton. I was simply playing an incredibly stupid preadolescent prank. The se
cretary didn’t notice what I had done. She innocently duplicated the letter and then distributed the flyers to the teachers. Some of the teachers sent the flyers home with their pupils before someone noticed what had been perpetrated.

  The next day, I was busted. I readily admitted to my stupid stunt, and I was prepared to accept my punishment. I was sentenced to a loss of office privileges and the stool in the corner of Mrs. Robinson’s office, one hour each Friday for the rest of the school year. Her office had glass walls, and so I prepared for the abject humiliation of being stared at and laughed at by all the kids in school as they made their way to the lunchroom.

  Despite my admission, my parents refused to believe that I had pulled the stunt, and they argued with Mrs. Robinson that I was incapable of such an act, going so far as trying to prove that I didn’t know any curse words. They suggested that another student must somehow have coerced me into taking the blame, despite the fact that the handwriting was clearly mine. They finally overcame their cognitive dissonance and came to understand that I was the guilty party. Embarrassed that they had come to my defense, my father scolded me, and my reward was the severe spanking that I mentioned above.

  My parents had come to my defense because they thought that they knew exactly who I was and what I had in me. They “knew” that I was incapable of such misbehavior, which was so remote from the formula that they had established that dictated my life. Perhaps my prank was a cry for help, an attempt to show my parents that I was something more than the x that had to satisfy their equation. If it was such a cry, it certainly failed in its purpose. I received my spanking, and life went on as before.

  But those formulas required success, and we boys had to do our part to meet those requirements. My parents believed that Momoro and I had the talent to be “the best,” perhaps as an artifact of their upbringing, which promoted the idea that the Japanese are a superior race. Perhaps they simply couldn’t accept the idea of their children being anything less than the top. They believed that Momoro could become a world-class pianist, another Vladimir Horowitz, and that I could become an influential mathematician.

  Like any child, I wanted my parents to be proud of me, but if they were, I never knew it, for their philosophy of parenting left no room for praise. I was especially sure my father, who played such a small role in day-to-day parenting, considered me a failure. I had no idea that traditional Japanese families were different from the American families that were all I had for comparison. How was I to know? And if I had known, would it have helped? I craved my father’s approval, a need that would haunt me for decades.

  My parents deprived me of almost everything that didn’t have an academic purpose. As I have mentioned, we were the only Asian-American family in our neighborhood, and so I expected that there would perhaps be some differences between my family and those of my schoolmates. But I couldn’t come to terms with this degree of isolation and restriction. It seemed a cruel fate. As I got older, I realized that I had never played catch with my father in the yard. I had never been allowed to go to a sleepover at a friend’s house. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with friends on weekend nights. I wasn’t allowed to have anything that was part of a normal American childhood.

  This isolationism also applied to our nonexistent spiritual lives. Although my mother had shown some interest in joining a church in search of some sort of community, we had no religious affiliation. My father saw no point to it, and so my mother was easily outvoted. He didn’t believe in God. He didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t see or prove. Everything about his worldview depended on his strong belief that there are no mysteries or sources of wonder in the world that couldn’t be figured out with the help of the scientific method and mathematical logic.

  My father joked that the only reason to go to church was as an insurance policy in the unlikely event that he happened to be wrong about the nonexistence of God and an afterlife that would be denied to heretics like him. He could understand why people wouldn’t want to miss out if the afterlife were pleasant. But that was not reason enough for him to waste time in church, and as a result, I was raised an agnostic.

  I had no reason to question my father. After all, he was the man who had conjured a deep and important theory about objects called “algebraic tori” and “Tamagawa numbers.” It seems that he had solved a problem that world experts had considered unsolvable. If there was a divine figure for the Ono boys, it was Takasan, our math genius father.

  My father’s famous paper in the Annals of Mathematics

  As I reflect on my childhood from the vantage point of middle age, I have come to believe that my parents became cynical about religion as a result of the defeat of their spiritual government in World War II, when Emperor Hirohito was forced to surrender and give up his divine status. What would it take after that for my parents to open themselves to the possibility of a life of the spirit?

  I was thus never exposed to the idea that we are all are part of a larger community, each with the responsibility of trying to make the world a better place. Instead, I grew up to be a cynical adolescent who viewed humanity as a group of people mindlessly racing and competing with each other for their rightful place. I saw little beauty in the world, and I certainly didn’t recognize anything that inspired awe and wonder. I almost had no soul. I was body and brain and no heart. It would be many years before I would recognize how sad such an existence was.

  As a freshman at Towson High School, a school that would later claim Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps among its alumni, I lost my way and my identity. My transition from middle school to high school destroyed the little connection I had with life as a teenager living in America. Compared to my middle school, Ridgely Junior High, Towson High was huge, and to me, its students were huge. It was a soulless place that just swallowed you up and spit you out four years later. I had walked to Ridgely, a freedom that offered me the opportunity to hang out with friends both before and after school. But I rode the bus to Towson, and due to the way the school boundaries were set, almost all of my middle-school friends ended up going to other high schools. The little freedom I had before was now gone.

  With college around the corner, my parents stepped up their tiger parenting. My life was reduced to a mindless pursuit of first-rate academic credentials. Any score other than a perfect 800 on that SAT math test would have been a terrible embarrassment to the family. Any grade below an A would have been a personal disaster. A class ranking outside the top five would have meant the end of the world.

  As a sophomore, I also struggled with my identity as one of the few Asians in school. I understood that I had a physical appearance that was different from that of most of my classmates and that as the child of immigrants, there were some cultural differences to be expected between my family and theirs. But it was too much for me on top of the frustrating and confusing life as the child of tiger parents to have to deal with hurtful racially motivated teasing. Even though I understood that none of it was malicious, I still couldn’t stand it. I hated being called “Jap” or “Nip.” I hated hearing “Oh no, there’s Ono.” I simply wasn’t strong enough to embrace my heritage. I wanted to be accepted, and the teasing made me feel isolated, different. It would be many years before I could live comfortably with my Japanese heritage. At the time, I was simply embarrassed. Why did I have to have parents with strong foreign accents? Why did I have to be the kid with the strange last name? Why did I have to be the straight-A student whose parents expected and demanded more? What did I have to do to finally earn love and respect from my father? I desperately wished to be someone else, almost anyone else. I had become a pitiful loner who walked the halls of school head down, wishing I was invisible.

  Those feelings were compounded by my having been labeled a “gifted and talented” student, one of a tiny cohort of kids identified by the Baltimore County Public Schools for our ability to ace standardized tests. We took all of our classes together, and we marched from class to class as a group as if unde
r quarantine. My social role in school was clear. I was the archetypal Asian-American nerd. Being marked out as gifted was no comfort to me, nor was I comforted by the fact that my classes were easy for me. I hated almost everything about high school.

  I was being crushed under the high expectations set for me at home, which had always been more crucible than nest but now was unbearably so. How could it have been otherwise? My parents owed all of their success to my father’s prowess as a mathematician. Their few friends were other professors with overachieving children who were being accepted by top private colleges and winning elite music competitions. The way my parents raved about them, those professors’ kids were models of perfection. How could I even think about measuring up? I had to get into a college like Princeton or MIT; the local state university would have been a humiliation. It was all or nothing. The pressure of trying to live up to those paragons was overwhelming.

  Under those suffocating circumstances, I lost interest in school. I lost hope that I could amount to much of anything. I had been taught that every worthy scientist solved problems that nobody before them could crack. I had learned that accomplished young scientists must earn the endorsement of a master scientist, someone to do for them what André Weil had done for my father and other young Japanese mathematicians in the 1950s. I had learned that one could reach the highest level of honor and respect by overcoming formidable obstacles, such as isolation and poverty.

  And here I was with no obstacles, no excuses, yet no chance of reaching any level of honor or respect. I wasn’t starving. I wasn’t subsisting on meager bowls of rice while trying to stay alive in a world of smoke and fire. And yet I didn’t have a prayer of replicating my father’s formula for success through mathematics. But I had no choice. It was the path that had been laid down for me. I had been brainwashed into believing that there was no other way for me to have a happy life. It was actually worse than that: I had been brainwashed into not even thinking about what might constitute a happy life. It never occurred to me that I might step outside my preordained formula into something of my own choosing.