I’ve just finished recording the new series of the BBC radio programme Great Lives. It’s the really strange stories that stay in the memory, and for me Srinivasa Ramanujan is an example. The Olympics choreographer Akram Khan championed this Indian prodigy: a pure mathematics genius who died young in 1920 but whose work foreshadowed modern digital cryptography.
From a poor south Indian family Ramanujan had no real training in mathematics. He simply “understood” numbers. Visited in hospital by a fellow-mathematician who (in the manner of mathematicians) remarked that his taxi-cab’s licence, 1729, was a boring number, Ramanujan replied: “Oh no, 1729 is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” He was recovering from throwing himself under a train at the time.
I’ve never run a four-minute mile but I’ve run a five-minute mile, and can feel like an inferior member — but still a member — of a species whose finest can run the distance 20 per cent faster. Ramanujan had an instinctive grasp of the relationships between numbers that’s so far beyond my reach that I cannot see how we can both be the same animal. A Brahmin, he believed his intuition came from a goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. I don’t believe this, but have yet to hear a better explanation.
Since you asked, Justine
It’s Monday morning. An email pings — from the education secretary, Justine Greening. Except it isn’t. It’s just the universal mailing-list pap a party member gets. The email was headed: “What do you think about grammar schools, Matthew?” For a moment I thought she wanted to know, but soon realised the messager did not want my reply, though my name was sprinkled liberally through the “personalised” text.
So here, Justine, by another medium, is my reply. I’ve no need to have an opinion about grammar schools, Justine, because this was never going to happen. So why did you want to drag a policy turkey on to centre stage, Justine, upsetting critics, and (ultimately) allies too? That, Justine, is what I think about grammar schools.
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Llama naming
Sunday was a big day. Our new llamas arrived, two fluffy white creatures stepping gingerly from the horsebox into their new field and looking inquisitively around. Our existing two llamas are unsure what to make of this. After an initial volley of spitting and screeching, Vera has reached out. But Craig ran into the wood and won’t come out.
What shall their names be? We’re calling the male Ben, after the friend who was among the first to see him. The Times’s Ann Treneman (who lives nearby) missed his arrival but has made no secret of her yearning to have a camelid namesake. You’d think her professional achievements would be enough but no, she craves commemoration in another species. So Ann and Ben it is. They join Vera and Craig in what I hope, when the flying spittle has abated, may prove a happy family.
The fog of war
Last week I was on Newsnight for a debate on the retaking of Aleppo. There was no chance to say what I hope can be said without disrespect to distinguished war correspondents, both of the BBC and the print media. Their reports are everywhere. I salute — I really do — their physical courage and their obvious compassion; their graphic accounts and heart-rending video footage have brought the horror home to us. But we do know the suffering is appalling; we do know the hospitals are awash with the blood of the untreated. We know children are orphaned, and mothers are weeping in the streets. Yet the question persistently asked by John Birt when director-general of the BBC keeps coming back to me. “What’s your argument?” Birt would say, with bleak trenchancy.
Enough pictures. Enough “colour”. Enough reportage. Now tell us who the rebels are; which rebels we’re talking about; which are in the ascendant; what their strategy is; which side is likely to have killed that poor child on whom the camera now lingers. If you don’t know, say you don’t know, say it isn’t known, don’t just show us another corpse; we know what a corpse looks like.
We need analysis. Analysis is in very, very short supply.