Hardy/Ramanujan
| Pairing | |
|---|---|
| Pairing: | Godfrey Harold "G.H." Hardy/Srinivasa Ramanujan |
| Alternative name(s): | 1729 (Chinese fandom) |
| Gender category: | m/m, slash |
| Fandom: | The Man Who Knew Infinity, RPF |
| Canonical?: | Varied |
| Prevalence: | |
| Archives: | |
| Other: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Hardy/Ramanujan is the romantic m/m pairing of British mathematician Godfrey Harold "G.H." Hardy (1877–1947) and the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).
Source texts for the pairing are history and the various fictionalised treatments of the mathematicians' lives and work.
Interpretations of the Hardy and Ramanujan collaboration and relationship range from romantic to platonic or ambiguous, both in fictional canons depicting their collaboration and in fans' perception.
Canon
History
G. H. Hardy was an English mathematician specialising in number theory and mathematical analysis. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mainly self-taught Indian mathematician. In 1914, Ramanujan was invited to the University of Cambridge where he collaborated with Hardy for several years before returning to India. The partnership has become quite well-known outside of the science community after the biographer Robert Kanigel published The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, a biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan with some chapters dedicated to Hardy, in the 1990s.
According to his friends, Hardy had a few intense non-sexual relationships with men. There are no records of Ramanujan's romantic or sexual orientation except that, as per the custom of his time and origin, he entered into an arranged marriage as a young man.
Hardy called Ramanujan "the most romantic figure in the recent history of mathematics" and the collaboration "the one romantic incident in my life" in a series of lectures in the 1930s. He credited the discovery and championing of Ramanujan as the greatest contribution he had made to his field.
Fiction
Several fictional treatments of Hardy and Ramanujan discuss Hardy's queerness and speculate on the two mathematicians' relationship. Both the 2015 biographical film The Man Who Knew Infinity by American filmmaker Matthew Brown and the 2007 novel The Indian Clerk by American writer David Leavitt give their collaboration a romantic angle and present Hardy as a queer man to various extends. The 2000 radio play The Protégé by Jan Hartman has Hardy acknowledge him and Ramanujan as 'two parts of a single unsolved equation'. The play Partition by Ira Hauptman alludes to the mathematicians as Achilles and Patroclus.
Fandom
Western fandom
Engagement has a strong focus on fictionalised canons depicting Hardy and Ramanujan, such as the film The Man Who Knew Infinity and the BBC radio play The Protégé. Fan interaction predominantly happens on fanfiction archive Archive of Our Own and on social media platform Tumblr.
Chinese fandom
Engagenemt in the Chinese part of the fandom has a focus on RPF, with Hardy/Ramanujan being a subsection of a larger trend to ship historical scientist RPF. Popular platforms for fan interactions are the microblogging site Weibo and social media site Lofter, where fans refer to the Hardy/Ramanujan ship as and tag it with '1729' ( Ramanujan-Hardy number).
The interest in science RPF led to the creation of 虫洞神经网Sciencp on microblogging site Weibo, an informal group of fan researchers, writers and enthusiasts focused on several historical RPS ships, including H/R.
Fictional canons dedicated to Hardy and Ramanujan are generally treated as adjacent to the RPF ship fandom.
Fanworks
| Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples. |
Works in Western fandom
There is some meta on social media site Tumblr, and fanfiction on fanfiction archive Archive of Our Own.
Examples
- Tender sentiment at Trinity by wintersknight (19 March 2018), meta
Works in Chinese fandom
Fanworks such as fanfic and fanart are found mainly on Archive of Our Own and Lofter. After Lofter introduced a new policy on AI in 2023, some users deleted their fanfic and moved to other platforms. [explanation needed]