If I fail in my maths exam then I don’t think anyone would even bother to care, but if I tell you that our great mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, failed in his Matriculation exam then it is bound to raise some eyebrows.
The rumor has it that, Ramanujan in all probability might have failed in his Matriculation examination, which includes the subject Mathematics. But according to a report by The Hindu, it’s all a myth that Srinivasa Ramanujan failed in his maths exam. But still nothing can be said for sure because of the contradicting statements given by the people who were around him. It’s not that this question was raised only after his death, during his lifetime only these questions started a buzz among the people.
In an article published by The Madras Times on April 6, 1919, titled ‘A famous Madras mathematician: Mr. S. Ramanujan, FRS’ an employer of the great man was quoted saying, “In December 1907 … he appeared privately for the First Arts Examination and had the distinction of failing in all subjects, doubtless as a result of his illness.”
What further intensified the myth was the statement of C.P. Snow, a friend of Ramanujan’s mentor, G.H. Hardy. In the book, A Mathematician’s Apology, he wrote, “Hardy did not forget that he was in the presence of a genius: but genius that was, even in mathematics, almost untrained. Ramanujan had not been able to enter Madras University because he could not matriculate in English.”
These statements created a lot of confusion. The question was, did Ramanujan fail only in other subjects or did he fail in maths as well?
S.R. Ranganatham tried clearing the air by writing, “Ramanujan really scored a very high percentage of marks in mathematics. His failure was due to poor marks in the other subjects. This is the true story.”, in Ramanajun’s biography.
The two questions which now arises here is how an education system can be considered as perfect if a student of the calibre of Ramanujan fails and that too in the subject of his expertise, mathematics. Though this is an alleged fact, it still is a strong enough point to doubt on our education system that how can even a myth like this exist?
The second question is, has the situation changed in the past one century?
I don’t think it has. The marks based education system which we have is completely inclined on mugging up things rather than learning. What you know is not important, how much marks you have scored is all that matters here. Even if you are a genius in one subject and ordinary in others, it’s almost impossible for you to get an admission in a top college which might focus only on the subject of your interest, just because you may not have good grades in other subjects. This is another obstacle which students face these days.
If this would not have been the case then I don’t think there would have been even a shadow of doubt left regarding that man clearing his exams, who in known for making numerous discoveries in the field of mathematics. Some of his major achievements are, creating the circle method which helps in finding asymptotic formulae, developing some complicated identities for hyperbolic secant, and finding several series of theta, pie and gamma functions.
Madras Government did try to put an end to this controversy by asking the Madras University’s Registrar to comment on the result of Ramanujan’s intermediate exam. Francis Dewsburry, the Registrar at the time when Ramanujan gave the exam, said, “The office records show that S. Ramanujan appeared for and failed at the F.A. Examinations of 1907, after private study, four years after passing the matriculation examinations of 1903. His record is:
In all probability he absented himself from the papers in physiology and history.”
Even if this controversy is settled now, there are some questions which are still left unanswered. Is our mediocre system apt for identifying the geniuses? Because I don’t see any reason why an excellent student won’t get converted into a mediocre one if he/she gets trained only for scoring marks.
I am not saying that we can’t produce geniuses by our current system. Some of them will still surpass all such barriers of the system and its adversity, but the problem which I see here is that many will also go unnoticed because they may not cross the threshold which I am talking about here.
If you give an average machine the task to identify an excellent product, what result can you expect? This is exactly what is happening here. I don’t want our next Ramanujan to be discarded just because he may not fit perfectly in our education scheme which only cares for marks and grades.
