Excerpt
Chapter 1: A Boy Who Loved Numbers
The house was small and full of quiet sounds—feet brushing over cool stone floors, the clink of brass pots, the soft thump of pages turning. But in one corner, near a shuttered window, a boy sat with a slate in his lap, completely still except for the way his fingers raced. Numbers flowed from them like water.
Srinivasa wasn’t trying to copy anything from a book. He wasn’t doing homework. He was making something. Adding, dividing, rearranging. He would stop and stare into space for a long moment, then press his chalk to the slate again with even more speed. When the numbers didn’t behave the way he wanted them to, he didn’t frown. He just looked more curious, like the problem had turned into a puzzle worth solving.
Kumbakonam, the town he lived in, was full of old temples, narrow streets, and riverbanks where women washed clothes in colorful rows. People sold mangoes and spices in the busy market, and roosters sometimes shouted louder than the bells. It was a warm place, both in weather and in how people knew each other. Most children played in the dirt, followed their mothers to the shops, or practiced their lessons from schoolbooks. Srinivasa did those things, too, but something else was always pulling at his attention—patterns, shapes, numbers, the way things fit together or refused to.
He didn’t look like a math genius. He looked like any other skinny boy in South India, barefoot and bright-eyed. He got stomachaches sometimes and liked sweet flatbreads when his mother made them. But the inside of his head didn’t work like most people’s. It was filled with questions that wouldn’t let go.
Why do numbers behave the way they do? What happens when they stretch past what you can see? Is there an end to all the counting? Is there something beyond that?
Srinivasa didn’t ask these things out loud very often. He wasn’t shy, exactly, but he’d already learned that when he shared some of his stranger thoughts, people stared or laughed or told him to focus on real things. Still, he didn’t stop wondering. He just took his thoughts back to the slate and scribbled harder.
When he did speak, it was usually to ask a question that surprised the adults around him. Once, he asked a teacher how you could divide zero by zero. The teacher gave a quick answer, something about it being undefined, but Srinivasa kept pressing: “But if zero has nothing, and you divide it into nothing, doesn’t it still make nothing? Why doesn’t that work?”
The teacher had no reply that made sense to him. Srinivasa didn’t mind. He kept thinking about it long after everyone else moved on.
Most of the time, his thoughts ran ahead of his age. That didn’t help him much in school. He was good—no, amazing—at math, but not always at following directions. If a subject bored him, he tuned out. If something interested him, he dove into it so deeply that he sometimes forgot to eat. His parents didn’t know what to do with this strange gift of his. They worried about him like all parents do, but they also watched him with a kind of quiet awe.
His mother was especially proud. She didn’t understand the equations he muttered under his breath or the patterns he pointed out on ceiling tiles, but she saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about numbers. When he sat down to eat, he’d often count the pieces of fruit on his plate in new ways or rearrange them into groups, saying things like, “Three twos is six, but also two threes.” His mother would smile and nod, though she didn’t know what it all meant. What she did know was that something big lived inside her son’s mind.
Some neighbors thought he was too quiet, too serious, maybe even a little odd. Other kids weren’t always sure what to make of him. He didn’t play rough games. He didn’t talk much about cricket or animals or funny stories. But if someone gave him a problem to solve, even a riddle, his whole face would change. It was like flipping a switch.
One day, a friend asked him, “What’s the biggest number there is?”
Srinivasa didn’t answer right away. He looked up at the sky instead. Then he said, “You can always add one.”
That was the kind of answer he gave. Not just clever—but something that made people think longer than they expected.
At night, while others drifted off to sleep, Srinivasa lay awake staring at the ceiling beams. He thought about the way stars looked like dots in the sky. Were they numbers, too? Did the universe follow rules the same way math did? Could numbers help explain the things no one else could see?
In the early mornings, before the sun got too hot, he walked to the temple with his mother. The temple had carvings of gods and stories, full of symbols and shapes. Srinivasa didn’t just see the beauty—he saw math in the symmetry. The way columns matched. The way steps led upward in equal lines. To him, math wasn’t trapped in a notebook. It was everywhere.
He loved puzzles with whole numbers—numbers you could count on your fingers. Fractions and decimals weren’t as exciting. He liked things clean, sharp, solid. If someone said a number couldn’t do something, he’d try to prove it could.
The town didn’t have many books. And they didn’t have computers, of course. No internet. No science shows. Just old libraries, dusty pages, and scribbled notes. But even with so little, Srinivasa kept finding ways to learn. He didn’t always know the names for what he was doing. Sometimes, he invented ideas that already existed. Other times, he created ideas no one had ever seen before.
He didn’t know it yet, but math would become both his greatest joy and his biggest challenge. It would open doors, close others, and carry him far beyond his hometown. But for now, in the quiet corners of Kumbakonam, with chalk and slate, Srinivasa Ramanujan was already starting to build his own world—one number at a time.
The house was small and full of quiet sounds—feet brushing over cool stone floors, the clink of brass pots, the soft thump of pages turning. But in one corner, near a shuttered window, a boy sat with a slate in his lap, completely still except for the way his fingers raced. Numbers flowed from them like water.
Srinivasa wasn’t trying to copy anything from a book. He wasn’t doing homework. He was making something. Adding, dividing, rearranging. He would stop and stare into space for a long moment, then press his chalk to the slate again with even more speed. When the numbers didn’t behave the way he wanted them to, he didn’t frown. He just looked more curious, like the problem had turned into a puzzle worth solving.
Kumbakonam, the town he lived in, was full of old temples, narrow streets, and riverbanks where women washed clothes in colorful rows. People sold mangoes and spices in the busy market, and roosters sometimes shouted louder than the bells. It was a warm place, both in weather and in how people knew each other. Most children played in the dirt, followed their mothers to the shops, or practiced their lessons from schoolbooks. Srinivasa did those things, too, but something else was always pulling at his attention—patterns, shapes, numbers, the way things fit together or refused to.
He didn’t look like a math genius. He looked like any other skinny boy in South India, barefoot and bright-eyed. He got stomachaches sometimes and liked sweet flatbreads when his mother made them. But the inside of his head didn’t work like most people’s. It was filled with questions that wouldn’t let go.
Why do numbers behave the way they do? What happens when they stretch past what you can see? Is there an end to all the counting? Is there something beyond that?
Srinivasa didn’t ask these things out loud very often. He wasn’t shy, exactly, but he’d already learned that when he shared some of his stranger thoughts, people stared or laughed or told him to focus on real things. Still, he didn’t stop wondering. He just took his thoughts back to the slate and scribbled harder.
When he did speak, it was usually to ask a question that surprised the adults around him. Once, he asked a teacher how you could divide zero by zero. The teacher gave a quick answer, something about it being undefined, but Srinivasa kept pressing: “But if zero has nothing, and you divide it into nothing, doesn’t it still make nothing? Why doesn’t that work?”
The teacher had no reply that made sense to him. Srinivasa didn’t mind. He kept thinking about it long after everyone else moved on.
Most of the time, his thoughts ran ahead of his age. That didn’t help him much in school. He was good—no, amazing—at math, but not always at following directions. If a subject bored him, he tuned out. If something interested him, he dove into it so deeply that he sometimes forgot to eat. His parents didn’t know what to do with this strange gift of his. They worried about him like all parents do, but they also watched him with a kind of quiet awe.
His mother was especially proud. She didn’t understand the equations he muttered under his breath or the patterns he pointed out on ceiling tiles, but she saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about numbers. When he sat down to eat, he’d often count the pieces of fruit on his plate in new ways or rearrange them into groups, saying things like, “Three twos is six, but also two threes.” His mother would smile and nod, though she didn’t know what it all meant. What she did know was that something big lived inside her son’s mind.
Some neighbors thought he was too quiet, too serious, maybe even a little odd. Other kids weren’t always sure what to make of him. He didn’t play rough games. He didn’t talk much about cricket or animals or funny stories. But if someone gave him a problem to solve, even a riddle, his whole face would change. It was like flipping a switch.
One day, a friend asked him, “What’s the biggest number there is?”
Srinivasa didn’t answer right away. He looked up at the sky instead. Then he said, “You can always add one.”
That was the kind of answer he gave. Not just clever—but something that made people think longer than they expected.
At night, while others drifted off to sleep, Srinivasa lay awake staring at the ceiling beams. He thought about the way stars looked like dots in the sky. Were they numbers, too? Did the universe follow rules the same way math did? Could numbers help explain the things no one else could see?
In the early mornings, before the sun got too hot, he walked to the temple with his mother. The temple had carvings of gods and stories, full of symbols and shapes. Srinivasa didn’t just see the beauty—he saw math in the symmetry. The way columns matched. The way steps led upward in equal lines. To him, math wasn’t trapped in a notebook. It was everywhere.
He loved puzzles with whole numbers—numbers you could count on your fingers. Fractions and decimals weren’t as exciting. He liked things clean, sharp, solid. If someone said a number couldn’t do something, he’d try to prove it could.
The town didn’t have many books. And they didn’t have computers, of course. No internet. No science shows. Just old libraries, dusty pages, and scribbled notes. But even with so little, Srinivasa kept finding ways to learn. He didn’t always know the names for what he was doing. Sometimes, he invented ideas that already existed. Other times, he created ideas no one had ever seen before.
He didn’t know it yet, but math would become both his greatest joy and his biggest challenge. It would open doors, close others, and carry him far beyond his hometown. But for now, in the quiet corners of Kumbakonam, with chalk and slate, Srinivasa Ramanujan was already starting to build his own world—one number at a time.