In January of 1913,
famed British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy received
an unusual letter in the mail.
It began, "Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself
to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department
of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary
of only £20 per annum."
It then presented seemingly outrageous claims
that its author had made "startling" progress on a theory
of divergent series in mathematics
and had solved a well-established problem
of the distribution of prime numbers.
As a prominent mathematician,
it was not rare for Hardy to receive letters from fanatics
and crackpots, making ridiculous claims and wild assertions.
At first glance, this appeared to fit the bill.
Yet, as Hardy began to look more closely,
he quickly realized that this letter
was something completely different.
Over ten pages,
the letter contained 120 advanced mathematical theorems;
some, Hardy realized, seemed to be independent rediscoveries
of concepts already proven,
while others appeared entirely groundbreaking,
baffling even the great Hardy.
After showing the letter to his colleague,
John Edensor Littlewood,
Hardy concluded the results
"must be true because, if they were not true,
no one would have had the imagination to invent them."
Immediately, he surmised the letter must have been written
by a mathematician of the highest ability,
some sort of genius like Euler or Jacobi.
Only one question remained:
Who was this mystery man,
this Indian clerk making £20 a year?
How was it possible that this total unknown had reached
and even surpassed the greatest mathematical minds
in the world?
On December 22, 1887, a child was born in Madras, India, one
of many in a country of, at the time,
nearly 300 million people.
He was given the name Ramanujan meaning,
"the brother of Rama," a Hindu deity.
But this was not just any child.
Before he hit puberty, Srinivasa Ramanujan had become
a mathematical prodigy almost totally by accident.
By the age of 11, he had exhausted
and surpassed the knowledge of two college students
who happened to be boarding with his family.
At 13, he mastered advanced trigonometry without a teacher,
alone, from a book someone had lent him,
and began creating his own theorems.
At 16, he stumbled by chance across a copy
of George Shoobridge Carr's seminal work
A Synopsis of Elementary Results
in Pure and Applied Mathematics
and began to work through its 5000 theorems.
The next year, Ramanujan independently developed
and investigated the Bernoulli numbers
and calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant
to fifteen decimal places,
completing as a teenager and without mentorship what
the world's greatest mathematical minds
had painstakingly accomplished over centuries.
His peers and schoolmates said they "rarely understood him,"
and that rather they simply "stood in respectful awe."
The headmaster of his school,
while presenting him with a mathematics award,
said Ramanujan deserved a score higher than the maximum.
In recognition of his obvious ability,
Ramanujan received a scholarship
when he completed high school to study
at the prestigious Government Arts College, Kumbakonam.
But once he was there, he could focus on nothing but math,
failing most of his other courses in the process
and seeing his scholarship revoked.
He would leave school then return, then leave again,
before taking a job as a low-level government clerk.
Through it all, he pursued independent mathematical research
at every opportunity, often living in poverty
and on the brink of starvation,
sustained only by his inherent brilliance.
It may have been that this was where the story
of Ramanujan ended, unknown and undiscovered
in some dusty office buried under a clerk's minutiae.
It may have been this way,
were it not for a letter he wrote in 1913 to G.H. Hardy.
It was Hardy, having rescued Ramanujan's letter
from the literal and figurative dustbin of history,
who was thankfully open-minded enough
to recognize he had discovered something incredible
in its author.
In a burst of excitement which comes
when the proficient recognize virtuosity,
he immediately set about attempting
to bring Ramanujan to England to join him
at the University of Cambridge.
After some initial resistance,
Ramanujan agreed and set out on the arduous journey
through the Suez Canal,
from the jewel of empire to its heart.
Upon arrival in England,
Ramanujan amazed Hardy with his natural ability.
Here was an untrained mathematician with an eccentric style
nobody had ever seen before
and a talent which felt limitless.
Through their collaboration,
Hardy provided the training Ramanujan had previously lacked,
metaphorically polishing the diamond as best he could.
Soon, Ramanujan was astounding seasoned mathematicians
with theorems that had gone unsolved for centuries,
and ideas never before considered.
In short order, he became an almost mythical figure
in the math community,
a sensation with seemingly impossible ability.
He was named one of the youngest ever
Fellows of the Royal Society at 31,
then became the first Indian ever elected
a Fellow of Trinity College.
The child prodigy had become a phenomenon as an adult.
Then, as quickly as he came, he was gone.
At the conclusion of World War 1,
suffering from ill health brought about
by wartime deprivation on his religious vegetarian diet,
Ramanujan would return home to India.
Shortly thereafter, he would die at the age of 32.
Years after Ramanujan's death,
Hardy was asked to rate prominent mathematicians
on the basis of pure talent using a scale of 1-100.
He gave himself a 25,
his colleague and friend Littlewood, a 30;
he gave legendary German mathematician David Hilbert
one of the most influential minds
of the 19th century an 80.
To Ramanujan, he gave a score of 100.
Having worked closer than anybody with Ramanujan,
Hardy memorialized his unique ability
in the following statement:
"He combined a power of generalization, a feeling for form,
and a capacity for rapid modification of his hypotheses,
that were often really startling, and made him,
in his own peculiar field, without a rival in his day.
The limitations of his knowledge were as startling
as its profundity.
Here was a man who could work out modular equations
and theorems to orders unheard of,
whose mastery of continued fractions was beyond that
of any mathematician in the world,
who had found for himself the functional equation
of the zeta function
and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems
in the analytic theory of numbers;
and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function
or of Cauchy's theorem,
and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function
of a complex variable was."
In short, Ramanujan was able to surpass even the greatest
of mathematicians while lacking knowledge
of the basic tools they employed.
He did not build his work on the work of others,
but rather seemed to just invent it for himself.
All told, Ramanujan compiled some 3900 mathematical results
during his lifetime.
Since his death,
nearly all of his claims have been proved to be correct,
opening up entirely new areas of study
and inspiring much further research.
In fact, his influence on the field was so prominent
that The Ramanujan Journal was created
as a scientific publication devoted solely
to work in areas of math influenced by Ramanujan.
But as decades have passed,
something even more mind-blowing has emerged,
another layer in the legend of Ramanujan.
As science and math have developed and evolved,
Ramanujan's work has become relevant to avenues
of study which didn't even exist when he was alive
in areas like computer science, electrical engineering,
and the study of black holes.
Consider, for example, that in his time,
nobody knew black holes were something to study,
yet Ramanujan had already developed a formula
which would be used
to describe their properties generations later.
As mathematician Ken Ono of Emory University
in Atlanta, Georgia recently described:
"Ramanujan's formulas have offered glimpses
of theories that Ramanujan probably wouldn't have been able
to articulate himself,
theories that nobody needed until they needed them."
How is this possible?
How could Ramanujan have known about things
which did not exist?
How was he able to provide insights
so far beyond what was understood in his time?
Of this, Ono said,
"It is inconceivable he had this intuition,
but he must have,"
while fellow mathematician Freeman Dyson,
of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
proclaimed Ramanujan
"had some sort of magic tricks that we don't understand."
Perhaps Dyson was onto something.
Perhaps there was a factor we don't understand at work;
not magic, but something else.
Ramanujan was known as a deeply religious Hindu.
Many times, he credited his mathematical ability
to his family goddess, Namagiri,
asserting that "an equation for me has no meaning unless
it represents a thought of God."
He described dreaming of blood drops,
which symbolized this goddess, and how after these dreams,
he would receive visions of complex mathematical formula
on scrolls unfolding before his eyes.
It may sound hard to believe,
or perhaps like Ramanujan had given in to his eccentricity,
but curiously,
it is not a unique story among high-level thinkers.
The creator of the periodic table,
Russian chemist Dmitri Medvedev,
said that it came to him in a dream,
that all of the elements,
including some that were not even discovered yet,
simply fell into place before him.
Albert Einstein was famous for his "thought experiments,"
in which he would sit in quiet solitude
and imagine the results of theoretical concepts.
It was during one of these thought experiments
that he came up with the famous equation E = mc².
Even Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was said to have received
the inspiration for the iPhone in a daydream.
There are many stories like this
among humanity's most legendary thinkers,
tales of random inspiration pulled
seemingly out of thin air.
But there is an explanation,
one which goes beyond magic or serendipity.
The explanation is something called the Akashic Records.
From the Sanskrit word "Akash,"
which refers to the essence of all things
in the material world,
what Plato and Aristotle called the "quint-essence,"
the Akashic Records are a universal database
of all human knowledge and experience.
This database is said to be located on a higher plane
of existence and available to be accessed
by anyone at any time.
Proponents of the concept point out that even Christian
tradition seems to hint at the existence of this database.
In Revelation 20:12,
the Apostle John writes:
"And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God;
and the books were opened; and another book was opened,
which is the book of life:
and the dead were judged out of those things
which were written in the books, according to their works."
Is this "book of life"
just another name for the Akashic Records?
Perhaps when Ramanujan received visions
of complex math formulas,
or when Medvedev dreamed the periodic table,
or Einstein conducted thought experiments,
or Steve Jobs saw the iPhone in a daydream,
what they were really doing was accessing
the Akashic Records.
Perhaps the most fervent supporter of the existence
of the Akashic Records is none other than Nikola Tesla.
In his book, "Man's Greatest Achievement"
published in 1907, Tesla said that:
"All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance,
or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space,
the akasha or luminiferous ether,
which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana
or creative force, calling into existence,
in never-ending cycles all things and phenomena."
Another well-known quote from Nikola Tesla, is this:
"My brain is only a receiver,
in the Universe there is a core
from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration.
I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core,
but I know that it exists."
Could this explain how these individuals were so far ahead
of their contemporaries?
Could they have accessed the Akashic Records,
where all human knowledge and experience is stored?
It may also explain child prodigies like Mozart,
who should not have been able to obtain their achieved level
of proficiency at such a young age,
or why historic inventions like the telephone, airplane,
and theory of evolution were developed not just
by Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers
and Charles Darwin, but independently by others
at near exactly the same time.
Perhaps these were individuals who had independently
accessed the knowledge contained within the Akashic Records.
For Ramanujan, this begs an important question.
Seemingly every year, his work provides new revelations,
new relevant applications,
whether on black holes or otherwise.
Already it has been speculated that in the future,
Ramanujan's work may have crucial relevance
to next-level concepts like time travel, antigravity,
and limitless energy.
The question is, if Ramanujan did indeed access
the Akashic records,
this universal database of all human knowledge,
how much did he learn?
What insights might he have left for us,
which we have not yet discovered?
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