Statistics show that “around 412 million children aged 17 or younger live in extreme poverty (less than a day) in low-income countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and conflict-affected areas.”    This alone is a tragedy and a travesty, for the billionaire-infested West, where $500 m. yachts are the new norm.  But there is another hidden calamity.

Lost creativity. As the American HBCU Historically Black Colleges and Universities’ mantra goes:  “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”   We are wasting creative minds, when schools extinguish creative thinking by their dominant convergent (only one solution) approach.  And we are wasting creative minds, when poverty in Third World countries keeps many young people from gaining proper education and finding open pathways to implement their creative ideas.

Consider Srinivasa Ramanujan.  He was born in British-ruled India, on 22 December 1887, to a Brahmin family, in Tamil Nadu. Ramanujan’s three siblings died in early childhood.  He himself was shuffled between grandparents.  In high school, he encountered math for the first time.  As a prodigy, by age 11, he had ‘exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who were lodging at his home. He read advanced math books, proving theorems on his own.  He tried to interest leading mathematicians in his pathbreaking work, but was ignored.  Then, a stroke of luck —  he wrote to the leading English mathematician G.H. Hardy, at Cambridge. Hardy recognized Ramanujan’s extraordinary intellect and arranged for him to travel to Cambridge.

Throughout his life at Cambridge, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results, most completely novel.  A scientific journal, The Ramanujan Journal, was established to publish works influenced by Ramanujan’s creative results.  As late as 2012, comments in his notebook were proving pathbreaking.

Ramanujan died at age 32, from a disease related to dysentery, contracted in childhood.  He was the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

How many Ramanujans are out there, in poorer countries, unnoticed and unrecognized?  How much intellect and creative thinking are we losing?

Warren Buffett has persuaded many super-billionaires to give away their wealth.  Some have.  But now, Peter Thiel, far-right billionaire, is persuading them to stop, to keep their wealth.  If half of the billionaires would give one percent of their wealth, to build schools and universities in poorer countries —  how many Ramanujans would emerge?

One of Ramanujan’s discoveries was 17 separate formulae for calculating pi (the ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference).  It turns out that his breakthrough has become highly useful in modern physics:  “….recent 2025 research from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) links  [Ramanujan’s]  mathematical structures to turbulence, percolation, and black hole models.”

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)