David Leavitt Does the Math

In his latest novel, "The Indian Clerk," David Leavitt writes a fictionalized account of the unlikely partnership between G. H. Hardy, a prominent British mathematician, and Ramanujan, an all-but-anonymous Indian filing clerk he recognized as a mathematical genius. Together the pair attempted to prove the famous and unsolved Riemann hypothesis. Leavitt talks to NEWSWEEK's Charlene Dy from Gainesville, where he teaches at the University of Florida.

NEWSWEEK: You know, even though the book is titled "The Indian Clerk," we never get to know Ramanujan the way we know Hardy, so it's almost as if half of the book is missing!
David Leavitt: I wanted to portray Ramanujan as he was perceived by the English people in whose company he suddenly arrived. To them he was a very foreign figure. Not only was he Indian but he'd grown up in rural Tamil Nadu. He was a devout Brahmin. He had been very poorly educated. He was virtually an autodidact. He claimed that mathematical theories came to him through the agency of a goddess writing formulae on his tongue. From a narrative standpoint, I thought it was much more interesting to allow him to be the center around which other characters' lives revolved and whom they basically turned into whatever they needed him to be. So in a sense he was being used by a lot of these people.

And Hardy referred to this as the one great romantic incident of his life. A lot of times when I talked to people they said, "Oh, do you think they were lovers? Do you think Hardy was in love with Ramanujan?" And I said, "No, I absolutely-there's no suggestion that their relationship was in any way sexual. But there is certainly a suggestion that Ramanujan represented a certain kind of ideal that Hardy romanticized. And that's very odd, considering that Hardy was in some very strong sense kind of anti-romantic.

Hardy was gay, although you've said that his colleague, mathematician J. L. Littlewood, referred to him as a "non-practicing homosexual."
Littlewood was referring to that old phrase, "a practicing homosexual," which was a kind of catch phrase, particularly in the '50s and '60s. The joke was that in a court of law if a gay man had been arrested and was trying to be kind of witty, someone would say, "Are you a practicing homosexual?" and the reply would be, "No, I'm proficient at it."

How did you first find out about Hardy and Ramanujan?
Well, I was working on a book called "The Man Who Knew Too Much," which was a nonfiction book about Alan Turing, a great mathematician most famous for inventing the prototype of the modern computer. He apparently committed suicide in the 1950s after he had been arrested on charges of "committing acts of gross indecency" with another man.

So he was charged with being a homosexual?
Right, when that was still criminal. In lieu of a prison sentence, he underwent a course of therapy intended to cure him of his homosexuality that involved massive injections of estrogen, which was pretty terrible.

Did he have side effects?
Yes. Breasts. He'd always been very lean. He started to get quite fat. It was very humiliating, obviously. When he killed himself, he did so by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. And the myth is that that's what the Apple in Apple Computers is a reference to, but Apple Computers denies it. Anyway, I was researching him, and one of his interests was the Riemann hypothesis. And I thought, "Well, I guess I'd better learn more about the Riemann hypothesis so that I understand what I'm writing about." And it turned out that some of the other mathematicians who had worked on the Riemann hypothesis were Hardy and Ramanujan. I became absolutely fascinated by their relationship and their collaboration, and it dawned on me that there was a novel there.