My Search for Ramanujan

by Ken Ono

  Yet I somehow realized that I was going to go mad if I didn’t find something positive in my life. I needed an escape, something outside of grades and exams to live for. In seventh grade, I discovered cycling. When I was on my bike, life became simpler, with all its complications reduced to pedaling, watching where I was going, and feeling the liberating wind in my face. Two years later, halfway through ninth grade, cycling became an addiction. I took up bike racing, and soon nothing else in my life seemed to matter. At first, I belonged to a small recreational racing club. But the following year, emboldened by my success in defying my parents by quitting the violin, I audaciously stepped up my training and joined the best team in the area. My will was so strong that there was nothing my parents could have done to dissuade me from pursuing my new passion. Of course, they tried to make me give it up:Ken-chan, Good students no have time for bicycle riding … It dangerous. You could get killed … It take too much time … So much exercise kill you … You will get so tan that you will look like obake, a zombie.

  I listened, but I refused to yield. I lived for the thrill of hurtling down steep hills in a tight aerodynamic tuck. I loved the harmony that I experienced with my machine when I climbed long steep hills out of the saddle, as if we were in a spirited dance. I cherished the mental freedom that I felt after pedaling miles and miles over the rolling hills that populate the landscape north of Baltimore. In my mind, I raced famous cyclists, such as Eddy Merckx and the budding American star Greg Lemond. I did all this to drown out the painful voices that haunted me when I wasn’t riding.

  To pay for this expensive sport, I worked part-time at Valley Pharmacy as a stock boy earning minimum wage. I swept the floors, stocked the soda machine, and delivered prescriptions to customers, one of whom, to my surprise and delight, was Johnny Unitas, the retired Hall of Fame quarterback who had played for the Baltimore Colts from 1956 to 1972.

  I lived for cycling, and much like David Stohler, the teenage protagonist in Breaking Away, the 1979 film about a cycling-obsessed boy coming of age, I was at odds with a father who didn’t understand me.

  I raced for the Charm City Velo Team, an elite group of local bike racers, alongside my high-school friends David Lanham and Greg Asner. To my parents, such friends were anathema, kids who would never amount to much, and they were never allowed to enter our house. My parents’ predictions notwithstanding, both of these cycling buddies would achieve success. David has enjoyed a distinguished career in the military, and Greg is a well-known environmental scientist at Stanford.

  We had sharp-looking team kits that included red-and-green skintight Lycra jerseys. We wore sleek sunglasses, and I was the first to get a pair of supercool Oakleys. The first models were more like face shields, and they made me look like Darth Vader, which was fine with me, since I hoped to inspire fear in my racing opponents.

  Goofing off before a race

  Several of our older teammates were college students at Johns Hopkins. When I first joined the team, I had the naive hope that my parents would somehow approve of cycling because I was in the company of Hopkins students. I hoped that they would approve of these friends and somehow support me in my chosen sport. Those hopes vanished quickly. Neither of my parents ever uttered a positive word about cycling. They never attended any of my races. They never even asked about them. They probably had no idea, if they even thought about it, where I had been, for we raced as far away as Pennsylvania and Virginia.

  My friend Peter Verheyen, who would attend my wedding in 1990, was one of my teammates who understood me and sympathized with my situation. He was a strong student at Hopkins, a top regional bike racer, and he was also the son of a Hopkins professor. He was more than a teammate; he became a confidant and older brother. Like my seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Sprankle, Peter gave me much-needed nurturing.

  Pat Liu, a biology major at Hopkins who earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, was our team’s star sprinter. In 1983, Pat won the National Capital Open, an important bicycle race held each year in Washington, D.C., on the Ellipse, the one-kilometer-long street in President’s Park between the Washington Monument and the White House. I enjoyed drafting behind Pat on our training rides, because his large frame created a nice slipstream that reduced my workload, and I was mesmerized by the sight of the veins in his calves that popped out like pencils when he pushed hard against the pedals.

  I lived for our weekend group training rides and road trips, and I enjoyed the fact that our team was really good. My cycling friends became my source of strength and self-esteem. Bike racing kept me sane by providing an escape from my isolationist home and the burden of impossible parental expectations.

  On my long solo training rides in the spring of 1984, I plotted my escape, my metaphorical seppuku, the ancient Japanese ritual suicide practiced by samurai who had brought shame upon themselves and their families. I had decided to drop out of high school and leave Lutherville in order to escape my hopeless circumstances. I would start life anew, somewhere, somehow, consigning my former life to a black hole of forgetfulness. Although I didn’t have a concrete plan, there was no way that I was going to graduate from Towson High School. Nothing would change my mind about that, even if it meant having to live on the streets.

  Ono Family mid 1980s (left to right : Takasan, Ken, Santa, Momoro, my mother with Igor)

  I tried to convince my mother that dropping out was a good decision. I argued that staying in high school was a waste of time. The classes were too easy, I said, and I hated them. I also argued that I could get into a top college without a high-school diploma. My mother, however, maintained that it was an absurd idea, and she fought with me for months:Ken-chan, if you drop out then never come back to this house … You will disgrace family, even worse than now with your tan face and long hair … Why you want punish us after all we done?

  I never explained the real reason for wanting to drop out: I was suffocating. I was desperately seeking freedom and independence. I couldn’t take the daily barrages of criticism without any hope of meeting my parents’ expectations. I had reached a breaking point.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

  Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_4

  4. An Unexpected Letter

  Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2

  (1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

  (2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

  Lutherville, Maryland (April 7, 1984)

  My legs are on fire. I’m fighting to spin the pedals of my svelte French Peugeot racing bicycle in a desperate effort to keep pace with Belgian cycling champion Eddy Merckx. We’re battling mano a mano, racing up the switchbacks of Mont Ventoux, the “Giant of Provence,” a cruel peak that had claimed the life of British champion Tom Simpson during the 1967 Tour de France. We’re racing for the finish line, a strip of white paint in the steep road at the summit, a desolate place marked by a decaying weather station. Merckx, known as the “Cannibal” because of his insatiable appetite for victories, sets an infernal pace. Somehow, I’m able to keep up, while one by one, all the others have fallen behind. The finish is finally in sight, and the fans are in a frenzy. Despite the overwhelming pain and self-doubt building inside me, I summon all my remaining strength. I rise out of the saddle and swing my Peugeot side to side in a furious sprint. And wondrous to relate, I leave the Cannibal in my wake.

  I am in a trance. I am not actually in Provence. In reality, I am training for next weekend’s National Capital Open, a race that Pat won last year with a ferocious sprint. My solo training rides are mental and physical adventures. They are my first experiments in deep meditation and visualization. I will eventually learn that I am at my best in a trancelike state, where I enjoy a union of body, mind, and soul.

  It’s a gorgeous brisk Saturday morning, April 7, 1984, and I have been riding my fancy French racing
bicycle in the picturesque rolling countryside north of Baltimore among attractive manicured horse farms. Clad in wool cycling shorts, a yellow jersey, cleated Italian cycling shoes, and a flimsy hairnet helmet, I am a sixteen-year-old Japanese-American version of the kid David Stohler from the movie Breaking Away.

  I eventually pull into our driveway on Welford Road and dismount. I walk to the mailbox; I hobble, actually, on account of my cleated cycling shoes, which emit a jaunty clip-clop on the sidewalk. I open the mailbox, and inside, I see a delicate yellowed rice-paper envelope covered with exotic stamps. It is addressed to my father, Professor Takashi Ono. That letter is going to change my life, though it will take me ten years to understand its message.

  Exhausted from my ride, I blink to clear away the beads of sweat that are dripping from my eyebrows. This allows me to make out the strange letter. The stamps tell me that the letter is from India, and the postmark makes it precise: it is from Madras. With the curious letter in hand, I ring the front doorbell so that my mother will know to unlock the steel front door and the outside screen door to let me into our crucible of a home.

  My two older brothers no longer live at home. Momoro is now attending the Juilliard School of Music on scholarship. Santa is also away; he is a senior at the University of Chicago, where he is just about to graduate with a degree in biology. He will repudiate his predetermined path and outgrow his role as the black sheep of the family by earning faculty positions at the Harvard and Johns Hopkins Medical Schools. He will later be named the twenty-eighth president of the University of Cincinnati.

  I am much younger than both of my brothers, and so I have essentially been brought up in their wake as an only child, single-handedly by my mother. Momoro left home at an early age to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a boarding school for gifted musicians, and I have few memories of life with him at home.

  Still in my cycling shoes, I hobble down the flight of stairs to my father’s office, where he is busy, as always, scribbling mathematical formulas on yellow pads of paper while listening to a transistor radio softly playing classical music. I hand him the curious envelope without a second thought.

  After lunch, my father calls me into his library, my former bedroom, which is now covered wall to wall with math books and is dominated by a large refectory table stacked high with papers and books. He is holding the letter from India in his hand, and although he is ordinarily a stoic and almost emotionless man, I can tell by the look on his face that he has been deeply moved by the letter. I’m not sure, but I get the sense that there are tears in his eyes.

  The letter is typewritten on delicate rice paper, and the letterhead features a rust-colored sketch of a serious-looking Indian man whose thick hair is parted, Western style, on the left side.

  For my father to take even a few minutes away from his mathematics, this letter must be important. “Ken-chan, I have to tell you an amazing story about this letter.”

  Janaki Ammal’s letter

  Dear Sir,

  I understand from Mr. Richard Askey, Wisconsin, U.S.A., that you have contributed for the sculpture in memory of my late husband Mr. Srinivasa Ramanujan. I am happy over this event.

  I thank you very much for your good gesture and wish you success in all your endeavours.

  Yours faithfully,

  S. Janaki Ammal

  My father explains to me what the letter is about. The letter is from Janaki Ammal, a destitute Indian woman in her eighties who lives in Madras (now known as Chennai). She thanks my father for his gift, a donation that helped fund the commissioning of a bust of her late husband, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a man who had died in 1920.

  Despite living in near poverty for over sixty years, rejected by her husband’s family, the forgotten brokenhearted widow had only one request when a reporter found her living in a Madras slum in the early 1980s. She had been promised a statue to honor her husband at the time of his death. The promise had not been kept. She desperately wanted a statue erected to honor her husband’s memory.

  Janaki Ammal in 1987

  After reading about this in an Indian newspaper, Dick Askey, who would later become one of my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, solicited donations from the mathematicians of the world in a massive fundraising campaign. He used the proceeds to commission sculptor Paul Granlund to fashion a bust of Ramanujan. Askey came through and fulfilled the broken promise, and my father was one of the many mathematicians who made a contribution.

  Granlund’s bustof Ramanujan

  I ask, “Who’s this guy Ramanujan? What did he do?”

  My father tells me the most incredible story, about the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan. It is the story of an Indian man who overcame incredible odds to become one of the most romantic and influential figures in the history of mathematics. It is the story of a self-taught dropout whose ideas came to him as visions from a goddess. It is the story of a man who had the courage to send his ideas to random mathematicians at the University of Cambridge, and then to accept the invitation of a world-class mathematician who recognized his genius and travel halfway around the world to work with him in England. It is the story of a man who suffered racial prejudice as he strove for accomplishment and recognition. It is a story of a man who would then die tragically at the young age of thirty-two.

  I am stunned by this tender story. I am also surprised that this short letter, which is really no more than a form letter, has stirred up such deep emotions in my father, a man I thought had feelings only for numbers and formulas.

  However, I recognize at once that Ramanujan’s biography mirrors my father’s life in many ways. Both men are self-taught creative geniuses. Both men escape poverty thanks to the generosity of a world-class mathematician who offers the opportunity to work with the world’s best in a foreign land. And both men are rewarded for their achievements despite the indignities and hindrances to success that they suffer due to racial prejudice.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

  Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_5

  5. My Escape

  Ken Ono1 and Amir D. Aczel2

  (1)Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

  (2)Center for Philosophy & History of Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

  Ramanujan’s story, as told to me by my father, offered me, a teenager about to drop out of high school to escape a frustrating and confusing life, hope that like him, I could perhaps accomplish something in my life. I was encouraged by the fact that the dropout had achieved not only success but greatness, and I was made hopeful by the fact that the dropout’s parents continued to support him despite his troubles. Most of all, I was stunned that my father held this college dropout in such high regard; he revered this man as some kind of demigod. I found that odd, because my father didn’t believe in anything that he couldn’t see or prove, and Ramanujan seems to have had a significant mystical side to his personality. I wondered how he reconciled Ramanujan’s claim of inspiration through visions of the goddess Namagiri with his personal beliefs.

  Although I didn’t have much confidence that I would ever earn the praise and respect of my parents, Ramanujan’s story offered a glimmer of hope. It showed me that there might be a way to earn my parents’ respect that didn’t require following the rigid script that they had written for me—the single-minded pursuit of academic credentials.

  I had decided to take my chances and reject my parents’ rigid formula for success, just as I had quit the violin cold turkey, and just as I had chosen to race bicycles against their wishes. But I still wanted parental approval. I wanted my parents to accept my decision.

  For them, earning a high-school degree is a minor achievement that isn’t worth celebrating. After all, the vast majority of kids graduate, so what’s the big deal? And so paradoxically, it was my parents’ low regard for high school that kept my argument in favor of dropping out alive.
r />   In a last-ditch effort, after months of heated shouting matches, I played the Ramanujan card. I offered him as a role model, a successful dropout whom my parents understood and revered. I had no expectation that they would accept such a flimsy argument after rejecting every other justification I could throw at them, but to my surprise, my father, who almost never expressed a firm opinion, soon agreed that I didn’t need to finish high school to get into a top college. Although my mother didn’t believe a word of it and remained firmly opposed to my plans, she was once again outranked. And thus it was that my parents, exhausted from my arguments and our earlier battles over the violin and cycling, gave me, if not their blessing, at least their permission to make my escape.

  I was astounded that my ploy, offering Ramanujan as an example of a successful dropout, had worked. I couldn’t believe it. I had offered someone who was nothing like myself, a man who had lived in a faraway country in a faraway time, and who was producing astounding original research when he dropped out of college. Surely I, who was dropping out of high school having produced nothing, wasn’t in the least like him.

  What made my father give in? I turned the mystery over and over in my mind. I finally decided that he had simply become exhausted from our endless battles. I supposed that he had relented just to get rid of me and finally have some peace and quiet. But I was wrong, though a dozen years would pass before I discovered the real reason.