From Ramanujan to Sasaram

December 22 was the birthday of the Man Who Knew Infinity, one of India’s greatest mathematical geniuses, Srinivasa Ramanujan. His birthday is now celebrated in India as the National Mathematics Day. A website noted in a tweet Ramanujan’s genius, but in a Facebook post, it took note of the Sasaram railway station, where thousands of youth come and get coached for entrance examinations – converting an Indian railway station into an evening makeshift coaching centre.

Jostled between Ramanujan and Sasaram’s youth, one is thus left to wonder how India continues in its search for geniuses, often in a sporadic and unsystematic manner. Some new studies are worth paying attention to this issue, ones which are examining if geniuses can be created or if they are a matter of serendipity to society. 

For those who are born and educated in India, falling back on the latter will probably be the preference especially if one is influenced by movies like I am Kalam. But the above studies provide more substantive thinking in this matter. For example, some argue that there may be a genius contribution to the GDP that needs to be measured, as MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson likes to put it. He demonstrates this in some of his upcoming work in the area of superstar firms, entrepreneurial tech-geniuses and their role in recent American GDP.

Meanwhile, Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule in a recently-circulated IMF working paper show with data in mathematics that individuals who demonstrate exceptional talent in their teenage years have an irreplaceable ability to create new ideas over their lifetime, suggesting that talent is a central ingredient in the production of knowledge. Notably however, they also find how societies lose geniuses, demonstrating that such talented individuals born in low or middle-income countries are systematically less likely to become knowledge producers. In doing so, they hint at the role of institutions not just in creating geniuses, but also in sustaining them, concluding their paper with recommendations for a policy environment that encourage such exceptionally-talented youth to pursue scientific careers, especially in lower income countries, so that there could be an acceleration of the global knowledge frontier.

This is an important finding juxtaposed with another paper by Stanford and MIT economists Nick Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb, who ask if ideas for the world are getting harder to find with evidence from various industries, products, and firms. They provide a provocative example in their paper with the Moore’s Law, showing how the number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s.

Combining the Agarwal and Gaule findings with those of Bloom et al, leads us to an appreciation of the critical role of national science and innovation policy that will foster genius creation and sustenance, their micro-foundations and impact on generation of ideas and finally what one hopes will lead into the powerful role of innovation for economic growth. However, that is easier said than done, since a lot about geniuses is also a function of how cultures in the East and the West have perceived, accepted and normalised geniuses in our societies. 

To understand this, one just needs to turn to the story of Japanese economist Hirofumi Uzawa, who wrote up the first two sector model of economic growth inspired by his post-war conditions or appreciate the work of Amartya Sen who got inspired for his work on poverty and welfare economics from what he saw with death and destitution during the Great Bengal famine of 1943.

Clearly, circumstances impact the genius mind and laying out a science and innovation policy environment may be a necessary condition, but not sufficient enough even with prizes and contests, national and global. In fact, societies around the world still are grappling to understand where geniuses come from. Hans Eysenck, the German-born English psychologist provocatively documents this in his book Genius: The Natural History of Creativity.

Eysenck brings to the reader’s attention how geniuses themselves have tried to understand the idea of the creative mind quoting various well known personalities. 

William Hazlitt for example has said that “rules and models destroy genius and art”, John Stuart Mill has declared that “genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom” and Jacob Burckhardt who has written on the Italian Renaissance has pointed out that “mighty governments have a revulsion against geniuses.” In addition, the book also has interesting segues to the notion of polymaths, the complementary role of zeitgeist and renaissance for genius creation, the definitional controversies around geniuses, or the classic debate on how geniuses solve problems in the realm of unknown unknowns, famously captured by Arthur Schopenhauer when he said that “Talent hits a target no one else can hit, Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Going back to Ramanujan, his genius and also the many rural youth who flock at Sasaram Railway Station from remote areas near Gaya for their makeshift coaching centre year on year – it is worth pondering if indeed one can systematise through public policy the process of genius creation and sustenance. Even Ramanujan looking at the youth in Sasaram railway station probably would have agreed and genius studies would have been enriched with new findings from India.

Author is with IIM, Ahmedabad