My Search for Ramanujan

by Ken Ono

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

  Ken Ono and Amir D. AczelMy Search for Ramanujan10.1007/978-3-319-25568-2_25

  25. Growing Pains

  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

  Los Angeles (1989–1991)

  Ramanujan’s story had offered me hope in 1984, when I was a depressed tenth-grader, that I could find my own path in life, and so I dropped out of high school and left home. My path was still crooked and uncertain, but on it, I had found emotional and intellectual support, first from my brother Santa in Montreal, and then in Chicago from college friends, fraternity brothers, my cycling mentor Tom Kauffman, and professors such as Paul Sally. Then in 1988, just as I was nearing the end of a half-hearted math major at Chicago, Ramanujan helped me a second time. The television documentary about his life reinvigorated my feeling of hope, and it inspired me to work hard my senior year. The documentary had caught me off guard, and it knocked some sense into me. I focused on mathematics my senior year and impressed Professor Sally enough that he helped get me into UCLA.

  Of course, I was no Ramanujan. I wasn’t a genius, and whereas he, as his mother’s “little lord,” grew up perhaps being told he could do no wrong, I as a child could do no right. But in spite of everything, I had earned a bachelor’s degree from a first-rate college and had been accepted into a major graduate program in mathematics with a fellowship. And I was loved by the woman I loved. If she saw something in me, I couldn’t be completely worthless, could I?

  Yet I was plagued with doubt. It was clear to me that I was nothing but an impostor. As the son of a famous math professor, I could see that for success, you had to work really hard, spending all day, every day, scribbling on yellow pads. I didn’t have a prayer. I didn’t have the necessary talent, and I didn’t have the necessary devotion. The voices in my head confirmed the hopelessness of my case:Ken-chan, your record at Chicago not earn you place at UCLA. You pull wool over Sally’s eyes and he think you good enough to be real mathematician. UCLA foolish to believe him. You not good enough. You going to fail.

  But voices or no voices, qualified or not, UCLA had offered me a teaching assistantship and a scholarship, and I had accepted and was on my way. I suppose I held out hope that I could turn things around in grad school. In any case, I could try. I had to do something, and this was the one open door. And who knows? I might somehow fulfill my dream of obtaining parental approval. In the end, I went to UCLA because I had nowhere else to go.

  I arrived in Westwood Village in Los Angeles in August 1989, and I moved into a studio apartment with fellow UCLA math graduate student and UChicago alumnus Brad Wilson. Our apartment was three blocks from Pauley Pavilion, the famous basketball stadium where John Wooden, the “Wizard of Westwood,” won ten NCAA basketball championships coaching UCLA with players like Lew Alcindor, who would later be known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton. Westwood is sandwiched between Beverly Hills, home to Hollywood celebrities, and idyllic Santa Monica, home to its well-known namesake pier and beach. UCLA, a world-class university, seemed strangely out of place in this southern California paradise. I knew that I was in trouble the moment I stepped out of the cab in front of our apartment. How in the world was I going to earn a doctorate in this warm, sunny place covered with palm trees?

  Despite our choice location, our apartment was a dump. We shared a gloomy room with a bathroom and a closet of a kitchenette. The rent was an astounding $628 per month, an enormous price for such a rathole. I would be spending over half my stipend of $7500 just on rent. And the exorbitant rents in our building were clearly not being invested in maintenance. The pipes in the ceiling above our bathroom leaked, and once a pipe burst, making me the unfortunate recipient of an unexpected cold shower.

  I spent the weeks before the start of classes enjoying my new environment. I went for long bike rides on the Pacific Coast Highway, which offered stunning views of cliffs, miles of beaches, and famous places like Venice Beach and Malibu. I went mountain biking in Will Rogers State Park, familiar to me as the set for the classic TV show M*A*S*H. I enjoyed eating out for almost every meal at places like Fatburger, Hurry Curry, In-N-Out, and the Reel Inn. Los Angeles had so much to offer, and I wanted to experience it all. I probably should have been thinking about the PhD program, but there were too many distractions to which I simply had to yield.

  I expected graduate school to be challenging, much harder than college. This was, after all, full-time professional training. No more general education, fraternities, and extracurricular activities. But as to how challenging, I didn’t have a clue. My ignorance didn’t last long. At orientation, Professor S.Y. Cheng, the director of the graduate mathematics program, welcomed us with an ominous warning. He predicted that one-third of us would drop out or flunk out within two years. If we were an exceptionally good group, then half of us would finish a PhD. Looking around the room, I queerly felt like a foreigner among my classmates. It seemed as though half of the new PhD students were Asian. But they weren’t Asian-American like me; they were Asian-Asian, imports from China and Japan, where they had earned their undergraduate degrees. Many of them could barely speak English. But it clearly wasn’t those students that Professor Cheng was worried about. He seemed to be speaking primarily to the home-grown students like me, and he sounded just like a tiger parent.

  Along with most of my fellow first-year classmates, I enrolled in graduate courses in abstract algebra, real and complex analysis, and geometry and topology. We were expected to pass four qualifying exams within two years, and most of us would take exams on those topics. As a UChicago graduate, I was confident that I was adequately prepared. Alas, I couldn’t have been more wrong. We at once plunged into these subjects at a much deeper level than what the introductory courses I had taken in college had prepared me for. To my surprise, the Asian graduate students seemed somehow to master the material with ease, despite their poor grasp of English.

  I was in trouble, and I quickly lost confidence. My voices, in that familiar slow, accented drawl, spoke to me often:Ken-chan, of course classes hard, too hard for you. What you expect? You don’t belong here. All that time you spend on bike, these students prepare for graduate school. You not good enough to be mathematician.

  I didn’t realize that I wasn’t alone. I soon found out that many of my domestic classmates were struggling as well. Some of them decided to pool their intellectual resources and form study groups, while I stupidly struggled almost entirely on my own. I also didn’t realize that many of the foreign students had already earned graduate degrees abroad before coming to UCLA. They had seen this stuff already. It was not a level playing field.

  I was alone with my anxieties, and Erika was far away. She was in her last year of college, enjoying a semester abroad studying French literature in Paris, living next to the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens. I wrote her dozens of letters in which I complained about my predicament. I told her that I was a fraud, an impostor, that I had somehow fooled Professor Sally into thinking that I had talent and potential, the right stuff to become a mathematician, that I was in grad school by a fluke, that I was in way over my head and sinking fast.

  In the spring of 1990, after only one semester at UCLA, I began to plot another escape. I was afraid of the qualifying exams. Many students flunked those exams. And for those who passed, what were their prospects? Everyone knew that almost all the recent PhDs were struggling to get jobs. The most I had to hope for was in a few years’ time to be one of those stressed-out students about to defend their dissertations while waiting to hear about their hundred-plus job applications, knowing full well that many of them wouldn’t receive any offers. If the best graduate students at UCLA, those who actually finished a thesis, were having trouble getting jobs, then what chance did I have?

  But that was
all in the distant future. Right now, I was petrified of the exams, and writing a thesis wasn’t even on my radar. Anyhow, it seemed like a mission impossible, like climbing Mount Everest without the aid of bottled oxygen, a feat reserved for those with superhuman abilities. My father had taught me that every thesis requires a solution to an unsolved problem, a question that others had failed to crack. How in the world was I, a mere mortal, going to do that? I finally managed to convince myself that I didn’t need to run away just yet. I would take the qualifying exams, and in the likely event that I failed them, I would then leave UCLA with a consolation prize, a master’s degree. It wouldn’t be a triumphant outcome, but not a total failure either, though my parents would probably think so.

  To prepare for the abstract algebra and analysis qualifying exams, I studied two to three hours every day for months. I pored over old exams, memorizing the problems and their solutions. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Abstract algebra was my area of interest, and so it was critical for me to pass that exam, for otherwise, I would be mercilessly exposed as the fraud I was afraid I was.

  I took both exams, and boy, was I nervous! I found them to be quite difficult, but then they were supposed to be challenging, and we all understood that a score of sixty percent would be a passing grade. I was not able to solve all the problems, but I was confident that I had scored enough points to pass them both. Several weeks of slow-drip torture passed before we learned our fate. Time slowed to a crawl, and then it slowed some more. I was reminded of my days as a preschooler, when my mother would take me with her to the local art museum, where I waited, waited, waited while she painstakingly copied one of the paintings.

  All of us who had taken the qualifiers were waiting for our scores, which we knew would come by way of a letter placed in our departmental mailbox. I did not exactly camp out in front of my mailbox, but for several weeks, whenever I was at the department, I would check the mailboxes every hour. I felt as though my entire future were riding on whether my score would be below sixty percent or above. The day and hour finally arrived when two envelopes appeared in my mailbox. This wasn’t like college acceptance letters, with a thick letter for acceptance and a thin one for rejection. If I wanted to know whether I had passed or failed, I was going to have to open the envelopes.

  The first letter I opened was for the analysis exam. I had passed! What a relief! The sun was shining, all was right with the world. It was going to be a great day, the day I overcame two important hurdles on my way to a PhD. I had been more nervous about the analysis than the algebra, so I opened the second envelope prepared to whoop with joy. But I had failed. I had failed the algebra exam, the one that I absolutely needed to pass. “Ken-chan, you a fraud.” I was in shock.

  I was also seized by a rational sense of disbelief. I couldn’t have done so poorly. I ran to the graduate office and requested a photocopy of my algebra exam. I stormed off home with it to perform an autopsy.

  Immediately on my arrival, I added up my points. I added them up again, and the sum again refused to rise above the magical sixty percent. How could I have screwed up so badly? I went through the test, question by question. What was this? Here was a problem that I had certainly solved correctly, but I hadn’t been given any credit for it. Give me those points, and I pass. I was exultant, but I required corroboration.

  In a fit of self-righteousness, I felt that I had to locate someone in a position of authority immediately to countermand my failure. I would explain my solution, and I would be reinstated among the elect. My nightmare would be over. Professor Elman, who had taught the first-year graduate course in abstract algebra, was the person I needed to talk to. I looked up his number in the phone book, and I called him at home. I read him my solution, and he agreed that it was indeed correct and that I should have received credit for it. But then he added, to my horror and disbelief, that a mere passing grade in my chosen field was not good enough. That I had passed the exam did not mean that I had performed adequately. If I planned to write a thesis in abstract algebra, I should have aced the exam. Squeaking by with a pass would not augur well for my future success.

  I hung up the phone completely deflated. I sat on the couch in our dump of a room stunned, frozen in fear and chagrin. I had passed both exams. I had not failed. I had been successful. A pass was a pass, wasn’t it? Why did Professor Elman not see it that way?

  I was angry. I had some important business to attend to, and I wanted it to be accompanied by the triumph of the successful completion of my qualifying exams. I did not need to be told, yet again, that I was not good enough. So I left Westwood in anger. My classmate Bruce Abe and I rented a car and drove the nearly thirteen hundred miles to our destination. I had a lot on my mind on the drive as Elman’s words reverberated in a continuous loop. At times, they assumed a familiar accented drawl: “Ken-chan, passing grade not good enough. You need do much, much better.” We crossed the searing Nevada desert, and after a brief stop in Salt Lake City to see Bruce’s mother, we arrived in Missoula, Montana.

  I had come to Missoula to get married. The long drive had been good for me. I was able to decompress and get that infinite tape loop about my failure in abstract algebra out of my system. By the time we got to Erika’s parents’ house, my sense of doom was long gone. I was thinking about my new life with Erika.

  Jan and Robin Anderson, Erika’s parents, are the friendliest people I have ever known. They are constantly inviting people to their home, be it relatives, friends, or even friends of friends. And so there was never any question as to where the wedding ceremony would be held. It had to be at their cedar-clad mountain home, which overlooks the Missoula Valley with the majestic Bitterroot Mountains on the horizon.

  Erika and I were married on June 23, 1990, on the front lawn of her parents’ home. It was a beautiful day shared with many friends and family members, including my parents and both my brothers, who had flown out for the occasion. Amazingly, my uncle and aunt Yoshitaka and Natsue Nomachi arrived by plane from Tokyo. Ron, my Pepsi-Miyata teammate, was one of my groomsmen. Erika’s sister, Holly, was our maid of honor, and Santa was my best man. Momoro played a lovely rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon for the opening processional. We recited our vows and then enjoyed grilled salmon, wonderful music performed by our families, and dancing on a makeshift platform well into the night.

  The wedding festivities provided a much-needed escape from my qualifying exam nightmare. June 23 would now be a special day for the rest of our lives. We had no idea that it would soon be important to us for another reason. One of the most important events in my life would take place three years later to the day. It’s not what you think.

  Newlyweds (photo by Jan Anderson)

  Erika and I returned to Westwood as a married couple, and we moved into a small studio apartment a few blocks from the one I had shared with Brad. We bought our first car, a dark blue Hyundai Excel hatchback. It was more go-kart than car. We bought the cheapest model, the one where none of the buttons on the control panel actually did anything. Erika found work in a Beverly Hills office, where her boss was Kelly Stone, the sister of Sharon Stone, the sultry Hollywood actress who was about to star with Michael Douglas in the psycho-thriller Basic Instinct. Thanks to Kelly, Erika and I would end up meeting all sorts of Hollywood figures. In fact, one of those Hollywood connections would soon get us our second apartment. We had gotten a tip on a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica from an actress who had a minor role in the TV soap opera General Hospital.

  That apartment was a cute little bungalow on 16th Street, one block from Montana Avenue. We loved the location. I went for runs to the beach on picturesque San Vincente Boulevard, and we made frequent trips to the Third Street Promenade, where it was not unusual to bump into a celebrity such as Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Arnold Schwarzenegger, O.J. Simpson, or Ted Turner, among too many others to mention.

  Early married life is a sweet time of transition, and for me, part of the sweetness was putting things in perspecti
ve and adopting a longer view of the future. As I reflected on my first year at UCLA, I came to realize that Professor Elman had been right about my relationship to abstract algebra. He was very wise, and he understood what was best for me. If I was going to train as an algebraist, it wasn’t enough merely to pass the abstract algebra qualifying exam. I needed to ace it. I had to prove to myself and my professors that I was a worthy PhD candidate, one whom a potential advisor would be eager to take on. Professor Elman had thrown down the gauntlet, and I eagerly took it up with a vow not merely to pass abstract algebra, but to master it.

  I realized that my earlier approach of reviewing and memorizing old exams was inadequate. It was more important to understand the underlying theorems, structures, and techniques than to know how to solve a small subset of all the possible problems that might be thrown at me. This time, I prepared with a completely different attitude. My goal was to try to understand the material well enough to teach the course. It is said, after all, that one never really learns a subject until one has taught it. And if I ultimately finished my doctorate and obtained a university position, then I would be expected to teach such a course. I approached my studies as though I were training for an important race. I systematically studied every theorem, how it was proved and to what kinds of problems it could be applied. The next time the exam was offered, I took it with confidence. I answered all the questions, completing the exam in half the allotted time. I knew that I had throttled it. I was so happy that I left the exam room hooting and fist pumping for joy.