It sounds like a legend, but it is Srinivasa Ramanujan's own account: perhaps the most astonishing mathematician of the 20th century traced his formulae back to a goddess. And the image of the hand is literally true – in his description a hand wrote the formulae before his inner eye. What of this is biographically established, and where does that begin which cannot be tested at all? Let us separate it cleanly – precisely because the story is so seductive.
Who Ramanujan was
Srinivasa Ramanujan (born 22 December 1887 in Erode, raised in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu) was a largely self-taught mathematician from a devout Tamil Brahmin family. Without a regular university education, essentially from a single book of formulae, he produced thousands of results – in number theory, infinite series, continued fractions and partitions – some of which experts could only prove decades later. In 1913 he sent a letter with around 120 theorems to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, who recognised at once that this was no impostor but an exceptional genius. In 1914 Ramanujan travelled to England, in 1918 was elected one of the youngest ever Fellows of the Royal Society, and died young, on 26 April 1920, aged just 32.
Namagiri – the household goddess of Namakkal
The family worshipped Namagiri Thayar, a form of the goddess Lakshmi venerated in the temple of Namakkal beside her consort, the lion-god Narasimha. For Ramanujan, Namagiri was no distant deity but the familiar protectress of the household. Even his birth the family linked to a prayer to her. In Ramanujan's own reading she was the source of his mathematics: she showed him the formulae, and he merely wrote them down.
The account: a hand writes on a red screen
Here the reader's question is answered concretely. Ramanujan described his inspirations as dream visions – and yes, a hand appears in them literally. In one transmitted account he says, in essence:
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind."
The red screen and the blood Ramanujan associated with Narasimha, Namagiri's consort; the writing itself he ascribed to the goddess. On waking he recorded the formulae and checked them. "From the hand of his household goddess" is thus not a later embellishment but a fairly accurate rendering of what Ramanujan himself recounted.
"A thought of God"
This experience was embedded in a thoroughly religious view of mathematics. Ramanujan is recorded as saying:
"An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
For him, finding a formula was not mere construction but the discovery of something already existing in a higher order. Mathematical truth and divine reality were inseparable in his worldview – an attitude that links him with other natural scientists who framed their science religiously, such as James Clerk Maxwell or Max Planck.
The Cambridge episode: when the goddess permitted the journey
How seriously the family took Namagiri is shown by a well-documented episode. As an orthodox Brahmin, Ramanujan was not supposed to cross the sea – the journey to Cambridge threatened to founder on the religious taboo. The goddess untied the knot: Ramanujan's mother had a dream in which Namagiri commanded her not to stand in her son's way. Only then did he set out. The household goddess thus stands not only at the origin of his formulae but also at the biographical switch-point without which the collaboration with Hardy would never have happened.
Hardy: admiration without the belief
In Cambridge a spiritual world met its opposite. G. H. Hardy was a convinced atheist and saw in Ramanujan's gift a deep mathematical intuition, not the working of a goddess. The religious framing he politely set aside – and admired the results all the more purely for it. Famous is his half-joking "scale" of mathematicians, on which he gave himself 25 points, his colleague Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 – and Ramanujan 100. Here, in miniature, is how two irreconcilable worldviews could share the same equations: on the mathematics both agreed, on its source never.
What is established – and what is not
Let us separate cleanly. Biographically established is: Ramanujan himself attributed his mathematics to the goddess Namagiri, described the dream visions including the writing hand in just this way, and named "a thought of God" as his measure; the Cambridge episode with his mother's dream is well attested. His genius, moreover, is real and to this day partly enigmatic – results from his notebooks, such as the so-called mock theta functions, resurfaced decades later in modern physics and number theory.
Not testable, by contrast, is the supernatural transmission as such. That a goddess "gave" him formulae is Ramanujan's own sincere interpretation of an extraordinary creative process – not a demonstrable event. A psychological reading would speak of deeply anchored intuition, of nocturnal processing and culturally shaped imagery; but that, honestly, does not explain where the often only-later-proven correctness of these formulae came from. Both readings stand side by side, and neither forces the other down. It is precisely in this openness that the case's fascination lies.
Ramanujan thus belongs in the line of first-rank natural scientists whose work cannot be reduced to a purely materialist self-understanding – not as proof of the supernatural, but as an honest reminder that the source of creative insight is more open than a closed worldview admits. More on the underlying question in our piece on the assumption that the brain produces consciousness.
Sources:
• Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity. A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1991 (ISBN 978-0-684-19259-8) – the definitive biography.
• G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan. Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, Cambridge University Press, 1940.
• Bruce C. Berndt & Robert A. Rankin, Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary, American Mathematical Society / London Mathematical Society, 1995.
• S. R. Ranganathan, Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician, Asia Publishing House, 1967 – source of the dream account with the writing hand.
Continue in our curated knowledge collection – see also the articles on Maxwell's theology, on Planck on religion and natural science, on Heisenberg's "central order" and on the question of brain and consciousness.