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BERKELEY, CA, April 30, 2003: Eighty years after his death, mathematician Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan is still surrounded in mystery. Ramanujan is one of India’s great intellectual heroes, a brahmin who defied tradition to travel to England in order to study at Cambridge; a mathematical genius who attributed his brilliance to a personal relationship with a Hindu Goddess. His work has been used to help unravel knots as varied as polymer chemistry and cancer, yet how he arrived at this theorems is still unknown. It is the friendship between Ramanujan and his British benefactor, mathematician G.H. Hardy, that makes up Ira Hauptman’s new play “Partition,” directed by Barbara Oliver. Reviewed as witty, intelligent, and surprisingly accessible to the math-challenged, Partition follows Ramanujan’s pilgrimage to Trinity College, where Hardy taught. The two men couldn’t have been more dissimilar. The naive, inexhaustible Ramanujan was an observant Hindu, adept at dream interpretation and astrology. His work was marked by bold leaps and gut feelings. Hardy, ten years’ Ramanujan’s senior, was a stringent atheist who prized rationality and intellectual rigor above all. The play will be at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley through May 18. For performance times visit their website at www.auroratheatre.org. HPI would like a Hindu writer to see the play and provide a review. Contact ar@hindu.org.

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