Ramanujan's 33 Just Wo(Men)!
Threading a Ramanujan's equation with the idea of paradoxes and Andre Schwartz-Bart’s famous book, ‘The Last of the Just’ in the shadow of our search for alien life-forms during the time of pandemic!
In the Lower Dimension
The dimension of anything depends on the perspective that one takes! A cube can appear like a rectangle. Life is all about perspective when we know it changes all the time, but how many sincerely notice the perpetual change happening all around us? Not many!
A scientist recently proposed that the three dimensions of the world that we perceive at any moment might all be an illusion: the world might be e-dimensional—less than three—around 2.7. If the world is lower-dimensional than it appears, could it be the case that we all are even smaller than we are?
I was walking on my patio, hiding from a tiny, invisible virus, and these questions were swirling in my mind.
A friend one day asked whether I was into the whole idea around alien civilizations. I told her what I had in mind point-blank, about how those intrigued by the idea of aliens, with so much deprivation and unhappiness around the world, have not spent sufficient time with themselves; these are overall unhappy people. How can one find time to think about unlikely possibilities when we know how to help millions and billions live up to their true potential?
She looked heartbroken by my response. Obliquely she hinted at the shocking lack of curiosity on my behalf and asked if there was any way to figure out how many types of aliens could be in the cosmos. I had heard of some frameworks like the Fermi Paradox and suggested that she should look it up online.
We are drowning in the number of theories and paradoxes floating around us and have forgotten how to live a meaningful life. It was then that I remembered reading about Ramanujan's equation many years ago, where he had talked about a rule that the universe seemed to follow.
Dreaming the God’s Equation
Given the stature of Ramanujan in the world of numbers, I thought it would be easy to find the equation online. After many search attempts, I could not find it. I wrote to a few friends, but none had heard of any such outlandishly foolish equation. However, they all were intrigued, given the equation's association with a mathematical giant like Ramanujan. Some quoted what Ramanujan had said about his mathematics:
“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”
While looking for the equation, I remembered that I had scribbled the equation from some newspaper article when the interest in Ramanujan, for some strange reason I don't remember well, had spiked way back in 2003.
It was astonishing that after so many interstate and intercontinental moves over the last 18 years, I still had that tiny little forgettable notebook that I had bought in Dallas in 2002. Like a boy with a sweet tooth in a candy store, I frantically started to look for the page with Ramanujan's equation, praying for my memory to serve me right. It's hard to convey the feeling when I saw my note and what I had tried to tease out from God's equation!
Here is my scribble in that tiny black notebook:
I had found the succinctness of the formula and its grandiose promise quite fascinating: Take all possible combinations of the shapes and forms--the number of sets in a power set--and then subtract yourself, aka your ego, and you would know. I had unsuccessfully tried to tease out some meaning in 2003. And, any time 2^n showed up, I thought about Ramanujan.
I was awestruck by how that scribble was helping me creatively weave a story so many years later; I thought to myself, "It goes on to prove how shockingly amazing this life can be if one is attentive to its unfolding. I took the equation, "Y = 2^n - 1", to my friend and started to talk uncontrollably:
If indeed Ramanujan had read God's mind, then this equation suggested that being the only self-conscious life-form meant nothingness, the existence being an undifferentiated puddle, and creation and dissolution were not happening; it was not the way life seems to be.
For a self-conscious life form like ourselves to be there, there has to be more than one type of self-conscious life form. Two life-forms like us meant a distinct presence of an unaccounted-for third entity that remains separate yet threading the two entities together.
When I looked up after my soliloquy, this friend looked at me as if she had come face to face with an alien.
She looked doubly endearing, with her face looking like a red grapefruit harboring the fear that I would think of her as someone not that sharp. To disabuse her of any such impression, I tried again:
I know it is tough to follow what I just said; it's tough even for me. When you start to talk about the point of origin, language is not of much use. Things do become paradoxical when it comes to pondering about the origin of it all.
This time, let me use an analogy of the relationship between a point, a dot, and a line, one of the most fundamental relationships in the cosmos. It is a kind of relationship formed immediately after the big bang when a singular point (a dot, a Bindu) bursts forth, creating all that we see around and beyond us, even before the emergence of the primordial soup.
She again looked lost, "Relax; I was thinking about Ramajunan's equation?"
I quipped, "Was it not all just a point, a dot, a Bindu, at the time of the origin of it all?"
I was thinking deeply about how else one could explain what I had in my mind to her? I zeroed in on a simpler analogy that I had been using much before I had any clue about the Ancient Indian texts called the Vedas and how often those texts had deployed such analogical tools to make paradoxical knowledge perspicuous!
The simple analogy was of clay and clay pots. All the clay pots are made of clay but ask anyone, and all they see is the shape and the strength of the clay pots. It takes a special person with extreme humility to see the obvious and know what is real!
All lines are made of dots but ask any line, and she would not stop extolling the virtue of her length and thickness, and some would even talk about their curvaceousness. Most are delusional!
She continued to look lost in her thoughts; I tried again:
Here is one example: A society of the US's size would need only 28 totally honest individuals to cover its base to protect its core value; the corresponding number for India for 2021 is 30! If these countries are struggling with their core value, it seems the largest democracies in the world don't even have such a small number of honest people amidst them
Do you find these numbers ludicrous?.
"No, I don't know. It's getting late; I need to leave," she left hurriedly.
A Non-Linear Dream
When I met my friend the next time, I recounted a recurrent dream: A line appeared in my dream, fully conscious; time had stopped. Like an immobile statue, I just lay there waiting for a new beginning. When I finally woke up, I felt as if I had turned into a point, and after many millions of years, I felt the line of my dream would let the point slide on her playfully. The possibilities were galore. I felt like going back to sleep again. Turning abstract was unbelievably soothing, as if the transiently manifested world was merely all theater of no consequence whatsoever. The abstract thought felt full of myriad possibilities, a puddle of unmanifested potential!
The next night in my sleep, I dreamt again.
When I stepped out of the residential dormitory in this dream, I saw an emaciated Indian walking the hallway; he was not looking happy. I stopped him.
"Hope you are alright. I am Ank. It's nice to meet you."
The emaciated Indian replied, "I am the younger brother of Rama."
"So... what's your name?" I asked again.
"That's my name: the younger brother of Rama."
I retorted, "That's not a name. It's an explanation. What's your name?"
Feeling irritated, the person responded: "You can call me Ramanujan. I am Srinivas Ramanujan.”
"You don't look that well. Can I be of any help to you?"
"Do you have some rice and sambhar? I have not eaten in days. I miss India."
Ank called his aunt Sukhwant, and she cooked some rice and lentils and brought it to them; it was wartime, and there was no tamarind in the market. Rama looked all sprightly after eating rice and lentils. He touched the feet of Sukhwant for her blessings and asked her about her interest in Mathematics.
Sukhwant didn't enjoy talking to him at all. She found him weird; she complained to her nephew, "Ank, who thinks about the number on the number plate of any taxi? How could someone so educated talk about his ancestral deity, Namagiri, coming in his dreams and telling him about the ways of Anks?"
Sukhwant first thought this South Indian fellow had a crush on her nephew that he was talking about knowing the ways of Anks (numbers). Feeling annoyed about all that Rama said, Sukh hinted to Ank to leave the room and come out to see her off. Ank left with Aunt Sukh.
"Ank, you, too, like him that much. You will get killed if people will get to know that you have romantic dalliances with men. For all the talk of their freedom and liberty, these Brits are quite parochial; take my advice and keep away from that Rama fellow."
"Aunt Sukh, you didn't get it. He was talking about numbers. Didn't you see how he suddenly got up in the middle of his supper and scribbled that equation?"
"Yes, I saw. What was that?"
“Y = 2^n - 1”
"What does that mean?'
"He was saying that we all need to find a line that knows how to take us all to the point, to the Bindu, to that dot. All lines come from a dot. A dot is a line. One needs to know how to turn the path that we take in our lives to that Bindu (the dot) adorning the representation of the primordial sound, or we all are doomed."
Aunt Sukh looked so irritated, "I didn't get it. I don't have the time for all these equations-uquations. I need to go back and finish my daily chores. And is this the time to think about number-womber? We might get bombed out of our existence any time."
The sweetness of Aunt Sukh made Ank smaller. He was enjoying this whole process of dimension compression. His consciousness was getting denser and smaller, but it was making it hard for him to live in the present. Rama had given him a clue. But before Ank could work on finding a line, he got thrown into the future. But these jumps and compressions were so intensely blissful that he didn't mind. In the future, the process of dimension compression had come to an abrupt halt. An entity had emerged from a cave somewhere in China that was even smaller than Ank. For that matter, this entity, the Coronavirus, was totally naked and invisible to human eyes.
Race with the Virus
I had yet to discover the way to enter into others at will. But this virus, this puny little thing, had that capacity. It first killed my brother and pounced on my father before finding the life-bestowing (Sanjeevani) herb. After my father left his body, I became quite sure that this Corona thing knew of my difficulty coming in and out of time and was putting me through some trials to find out how far I could go in reducing myself, reducing myself to zero, a dot. I thought this puny-one didn't know of my capacity to persevere; it was in for a surprise.
I thought of Gandhi and his effort to reduce himself to shunya (zero). What a laudable goal, but any sincere seeker knows that Gandhi was nowhere close to reducing himself to zero. He had come quite close at one point, but then he fell in love with Tagore's niece and started to write verses from the Ashtavakra Gita to impress her. Had Gandhi exercised restraint at that time, some clever men would not have been able to steal the fruit of his tapas (ardor and penance). There was no point mentioning who those fellas were; we all are like them.
I again got thrown back in time when my sister-in-law failed to keep her marbles together; she had started to blame me for not being able to save my family. Back in time, Ank was able to consult Rama just before Rama succumbed to his mysterious illness. Rama should have eaten anything to let his body function so that he could keep reading the mind of his deity for all of us, but he would not eat any meat. Before Rama was boarding the ship to go back to the land of rice and sambhar, Ank had become tiny enough to enter into Rama’s incredible mind. Ank found out the meaning of the equation that he had scribbled on the blackboard in his dorm.
"Ank, find a line that knows how to not only let a point slide on her but also knows how to reduce her dimension. That's the meaning of that equation that God follows. You need a minimum of two points; with only one dot, you will get absorbed by the Brahman--the primordial puddle of pure potential. For the sake of the continuation of the transiently manifested world, we all need to find a line that knows how to reduce itself to a point and in the process let us playfully slide on her."
"How do you know?" I exasperatedly questioned Ramanujan in my dream.
"I don't know. I am told so; I am just conveying to you what was told to me by my ancestral deity, Namagiri."
I recounted this dream to my friend. She looked distracted; she was carrying a book in her hand. She stretched her hand, holding the book precariously.
"Have you heard of this book, The Last of the Just, by Andre Schwarz-Bart?"
"No, what is it about?"
"This is one of the books that I found in my dad's study after he left his family and joined a monastery somewhere in the world. And this book follows the just men of some Levy family over 800 years. This book talks about how only 36 righteous souls are needed to justify our collective existence in front of God."
I was shocked to find someone coming with a number so close to the number that I had found so idiotically ludicrous. I told my friend that.
"You told me that you calculated the numbers just for the US and India. Did you calculate for the whole world? You know we are close to 8 billion now."
I looked at my friend and wondered why the idea didn't come to my mind earlier. I plugged 8 billion in the formula. I looked at her and disbelievingly said, "It is 33 this time."
"Wow...that is quite close to Schwarz-Bart's 36. There indeed is something special about this formula. Do you want to read this book?"
"No. I am reading its Wikipedia page, and it's written that a judge found the book 'the saddest novel I have ever read, almost as sad as history.' I don't believe in allowing the past to intrude and make us unhappy."
"That's so like an ostrich. Have the courage to know about your past."
"I will. But not now. I have to go get my vaccine appointment."
She looked at me incredulously.
"What?"
"You don't look that old."
"What do you mean? Anyone above 16 can get an appointment from today."
"Right. But why do I care for your age?"
"Yes, you should not."
"It's funny that in the next iteration of my size reduction, I will be getting some help from a microscopic entity. I need to keep marching towards nothingness, a dot, the shunyata."
She looked at me with a smile, "yes, I will help you. You are a hell of a persistent man."
“A dot is a line!” she looked at me with her cherubic smile and decided to stay for a simple dinner of rice and lentils.
[…TO BE CONTINUED]
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The earlier title of this story was Ramanujan’s Lost Equation.
Disclaimer:
Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation, to bring people to talk, discuss, and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn, and I will keep updating this article.
I would also like to acknowledge the help of Suman Chaubey with her editorial inputs.
Ramanujan's 33 Just Wo(Men)!
SAN-Jeev - I am tempted to enquire about your dietary regime, but that would be familiarity hence छोटा मुँह बड़ी बात...
the article, at least the first part, reminded me of a book I had read before I had met you "Mister God this is Anna".
I was intrigued by the statement, "his effort to reduce himself to shunya"... with due respect to Arya Bhatta and Heisenberg .. the impossibly ofof it all, since I is so engrained in that effort... as I am often reminded... it is like trying to still the water with your hands.
Jesus did say, "First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean" Mt. 23. And I realize I cannot put my hand within. Who can? Who then can? I need to find Him who can.
And yes, you have hit the nail on the head - an honest man who truly seeks... but not just an honest man... an honest and humble man. It is the I of the Intellect that often blinds our Eye.
If you are wondering ... I have started on a low carb diet ... :-)
Very interesting article, Sanjeev! It shows how mathematics, philosophy and self-knowledge are interwoven. The whole humdrum of existence seem to start with the observer and his thought of ‘I’, which radiates his consciousness as lines in infinite directions. Subtracting oneself means all the lines reducing back into that one point, the origin from where it all started. And when that happens, perhaps the point itself merges into Shunya, a word that has no parallel in any language. In absence of the right word in English, let’s just say that the observer becomes the observed.