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Srinivasa Ramanujan1900s-1910s, India and Cambridge

Ramanujan and the goddess Namagiri

One of history's greatest mathematicians told friends that his family goddess showed him formulas in his dreams.

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The dream

Retold in our own words from the sources below, not quoted.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught Indian mathematician, grew up devoted to Namagiri, the goddess of his family's temple at Namakkal. Friends later recalled him saying that she wrote equations on his tongue, or showed him mathematics in dreams.

One recollection, recorded by his biographer, describes dreams in which drops of blood signalled the presence of the god Narasimha, Namagiri's consort, after which scrolls of complicated mathematics would unfold before his eyes. In one, a hand wrote elliptic integrals on a red screen.

Where the story comes from

Ramanujan went from a clerk's job in Madras to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1914, invited by the mathematician G. H. Hardy, and died in 1920 aged 32. He left notebooks full of results, many stated without proof, that mathematicians are still working through.

The dream stories do not come from Ramanujan's own writings. Robert Kanigel, in The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991), collected them from the memories of people who knew him, and presents them as their recollections.

How it has been read

History

Kanigel suggests that Ramanujan kept this side of himself away from Hardy, a committed atheist, and that the stories tell us how his friends understood his gift as much as how he did. They are sincere testimony, but not a record in his own words.

Research

People who think intensely about one domain tend to dream about it. Mathematicians and chess players report dreams in their own language of symbols; what is remarkable in Ramanujan's case is less the dreaming than the mind that was dreaming.

Questions for your own dreams

  1. What subject do you know so well that it appears in your dreams?
  2. Does your family have a faith or figure who appears to you at night?
  3. Who do you share the spiritual side of your work with, and who do you hide it from?

Symbols in this dream

Had a dream that stayed with you?

Tell us your dream

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Robert Kanigel (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: chapters on his family goddess and working methods (reference not yet checked)
    • Cited at: chapters on Hardy and on faith (reference not yet checked)

  2. G. William Domhoff (2003). The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: continuity hypothesis (reference not yet checked)

  3. Deirdre Barrett (2001). The Committee of Sleep. New York: Crown.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: chapter on mathematics (reference not yet checked)

    Harvard psychologist on dreams and creative problem solving, with historical examples.