Culture Shock

Abstract

Like my father, who came to America in the late 1950s, Ramanujan had accepted the invitation of a leading mathematician to work in a foreign land. Both men struggled to fit into an alien culture with different languages and customs. In a way, Ramanujan and my father were both fugitives. My father fled the desperate conditions of postwar Japan, and Ramanujan fled a life in which he was intellectually hampered. I believe that my parents responded to the effects of racial prejudice, and in particular anti-Japanese sentiment, by enforcing kaikin, isolationism, in our home in Lutherville. Ramanujan, as a foreigner in England, was similarly isolated, separated from virtually everyone apart from Hardy and a few friends. If it were not for their shared absorption into mathematics, I think that both men, Ramanujan and my father, would have had an even more difficult time of it.