It has been a while since I posted. Some thoughts are becoming more important, thus I am returning.

This new trend started when I met Farheen Rizvi. She is a scientist, specializing in math and computers. I believe she is an engineer. She works at NASA JPL. She sat at the same table as my sister Nicky and I at my nieces wedding: Zarha and her husband Mohammed were getting married. Farheen described her job to us. And a feeling of astonishment descended over me. This woman is brilliant, I thought. She has a very big brain. 

I recognized a difference in her from my sister and I. She displayed self confidence, knowledge and a strength we did not, nor do we now, possess. Another generation. I felt compelled to get to know her. Where did she come from? Who raised her? What gave this woman, any woman, such grace, knowledge and strength? It's not that I am not strong in some areas, nor do I not have some intelligence in some areas, too. But there was a difference and I do not know how to explain it really. But it sent me on a quest.

Farheen and I became internet buddies. We wrote through texting or email. I learned she has a brother, Adil Rizvi, and he too works at NASA JPL. He is an engineer. Every vehicle with the name rover attached to it had his hand on it. His work is sent out to the universe and explores planets, sending data back to Earth. She and her brother were encouraged by their parents to explore science. Their mother was a biologist, the father specialized in the Universe in some way, I cannot remember. He was so important in the field, that a Denver company recruited him from India, with offers of the best schools for his approaching high school ages, great job for the wife in her field, and he would be brought to the US, paid for and housed, and all legal arrangements through immigration. So Farheen and Adil went to high school in Golden, CO, then colleges, and now both work for NASA. Two generations of Indian Scientists here to benefit the United States and its exploration in science.

I discovered that in the movie Martians, the woman who manned the computer that kept track of all travel in space, that combed planets, was designed after Farheen's actual job! She was interviewed by the movie makers to be able to get as close to the truth as they could in a fictional movie. Hidden Figures, another movie about other women who loved mathematics and computers, who happened to be Black, worked in NASA during the John Glenn era of space travel. These women saved John Glenn's life with math on a black board, and computers that were so large they had whole rooms to be housed in. In spite of racism and legal segregation in the 1950's, these women did service to their country in exemplary ways and I am sure their foundations of work in NASA help Farheen, Adil and their coworkers today.

So I bought the movies, something I rarely do, but I needed to see them again and again to try to come to terms with the big brains in ways I never developed. I am not following this trail to denigrate my own brain. I have my own  contributions made through out my life, in small circles, but contributions none-the-less, that better the lives my hands touched. But I question why my goals were so small. It never occurred to me that math was something I could do. I have said over and over again "I hate math." I even called the technical aspects of photography, the math of photography. I was never interested in delving deeply into the F-stops, and other numbers of photography. Essence of a scene is what I saw, and what I captured. And sometimes I was lucky and did it right. But at some point I began to feel embarrassed. My photography friends were fascinated by even the math of photography and went to great lengths to get it right. And we would be in competition at shows, and if I won the prize and they didn't I would know in my heart it was an accident. Still makes the image beautiful, but with digital the crowd of photographers was growing. I started painting dots, and realized I felt better about this work. It was truly me, not luck. So I gave my good camera away. Sometimes I will take an iPhone photo, like it and make a card from it. That's okay with me. But I no longer think of myself as a photographer.

Lately, I saw a movie, Infinity. It is about another big brain, a man named Ramanujan. He lived around the turn of the 20th Century. Born and raised in a small country village in India, he loved math. He ignored other classes because math is all he wanted to do. When he didn't have paper, he'd go to the temple and write his math equations on the ground. He kept notebooks at one point of all the equations that came to him. His family were Braham's, the highest caste in Indian's caste system, but they were poor. He concentrated on math so much that he couldn't get into college because he failed in other subjects.

He went to work in a place that exposed him to another mathematician, who then helped him write to various English Colleges to see about publishing his notebooks, by now filled with inventive math he was inspired to write, from meditations, or dreams. He was known to say, "An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God." Just from the looks of the movie I'd guess he was Buddhist. He meditated every day. He did sand paintings, not with color, but sand alone, as part of his meditations. His God was female deity in the religion, which also caught my attention.

Ramanujan was accept at Cambridge, Trinity College, by a man named Hardy, a famous mathematician of his day. He was an odd duck. No human connections. He has a co-worker whose name I do not remember, maybe Smalls. I am sad I do not remember because he was very important in the story, another brilliant math man. The time and place Ramanujan entered was a hotbed of British racism, and snobbism. Hardy recognized this genius of a young man, so fought his colleges attempts at getting rid of Ramanujan. But Hardy was not a people person. He was neglectful in making sure Ramanujan got basics. Yes, a roof over his head, but no heat in the winter. No attempt at knowing the person, so he didn't know Ramanujan was vegetarian, which meant in the England of meat and potatoes, there was very little choice for him to eat, thus he basically starved. The war started and soldiers beat him up for being brown and not a soldier, and Hardy didn't even notice Ramanujan had bruised and sores and was a mess. So Ramanujan contracted TB and his illness was not noticed until he passed out. He was diagnosed with terminal TB, so he tried to kill himself, by jumping in front of a train. He was saved, and by now Hardy seemed to wake up. This was a human being he'd recruited who he neglected, and finally had a real conversation. Ramanujan had a wife he left to follow the math. He sacrificed in ways Hardy never realized. Hardy asked him why he does math and the quote above, "An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God." Hardy was an atheist. "If you cannot prove it, it doesn't exist," he said proudly. But now he is faced with this young man who sacrificed, starved, became ill, and was threatened with death, because of his love of math that he credits God (a woman if I understand the story right) with his genius. Interesting.

So why do I care about this story? I woke yesterday morning in tears, sobs over the suffering that Ramanujan faced. Racism was at the heart of it. The establishment tried its best to stop him. And what if they had? It was bad enough that he died so young. He stayed at Cambridge for a total of 5 years. His last year he proved a theory called Partician. I have no idea what that means but its lots and lots of equations. And at the end of this time he went back to India and his wife. On the trip home the TB flared again. He lived one year at home, and then died. His notebooks must have been displaced, or lost, because in recent years they were found. And lo, the equations in them have been the basis of work done with black holes, with cancer research and so much more.

So why am I writing this? All the individuals above who contribute to science, all whom had and have big brains, are brown people. Our country has tried to stop people of color from developing the big brains like Kathryn Johnson, Mathematician,  Dorothy Vaughn, Mathematician, Mary Jackson, Aeronautical Engineer, Ramanujan, Mathematician and yet they are remembered now. My friends Farheen and her brother Adil, work in the same fields, as Engineers, and are brown Indian (India), Americans. The doors were wide open to them. I cried yesterday mourning for Ramanujan and the cruelty he experienced. Racism has been a constant in my life too. How much more advanced we'd be in so many areas had we not put roadblocks up in front of brown people. Look at the ones who ignored the blocks, and pushed on anyway.

I am hoping the author of Infinity is true to his word, that lay people will be able to access the mathematic formulas that Ramanujan wrote. I hope I can learn something about math that doesn't chase me away, as it always has since I was a child. I do not truly understand why I am on this quest. Except, I have been doing art for years now. I have had the experience Ramanujan described in the movie of painting dots, and time and space disappearing, and when I become conscious again, I produced something that astounds me because I find it hard to believe that me, Shirley Keller, could do that. Also, I found a quote from Hardy, "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns." Maybe the math isn't so foreign to me after all. I cannot wait until the book arrives today or tomorrow. And the adventure will begin.