Family History

[kitsunerei88]

Title: Family History
Fandom: Numb3rs
Character(s): Amita Ramanujan
Rating: G
Genre: General
Summary: Amita Ramanujan hated math. For numb3rs100, Prompt # 347: Grandparent
Disclaimer: Numb3rs is so not my property and belongs to someone who is not me. But depending on which jurisdiction you’re in, you’ve got no case anyway. My dealing is so fair.
Word Count: 300

“But paati, I hate math.” Amita kicked her feet under the table in frustration. “I’m never going to be good at it. Can’t I go play outside?”

Her grandmother looked up from her knitting, and Amita knew the lecture that was coming. She heard it all the time, at least three or four times a week. She never got to go play with her friends; there was always homework, and math tutoring, and more homework after that . . . It wasn’t her fault she had Ds in math. It just wasn’t her thing. She was good at art, and English, and social science.

“Amita, you are very lucky to be able to go to school,” her grandmother scolded, fingers still flying with yarn and needles. I could only go to school until grade three, Amita finished silently. Blah blah blah, be grateful.

“I know that,” she interrupted. “You’ve told me again and again and again. I am going to be a translator, or a lawyer, or an artist. I don’t need to know math!”

Paati stopped, and set down the knitting. “Let me show you something.” She tottered over to the bookshelf and pulled a notebook down from the very top. Amita couldn’t reach that high yet – all of her books were on the bottom shelves. It was an old notebook, worn with yellowed pages. “This was my great-uncle’s,” Paati said solemnly, “Srinivasa Ramanujan.” Amita opened it carefully, and saw pages and pages of numbers. Formulae she’d never seen before, doing things she couldn’t even guess at. “Much of our family’s good fortune is today due to him. One day, before I die, I would like to know what he did, what he discovered, to give us that good fortune.”

Amita shut up and went back to her homework.

Comments

[kitsunerei88]

Thanks! :) Srinivasa Ramanujan was an important Indian mathematician from about the turn of the century and is who the character Amita Ramanujan is named for, so I tried to weave the whole family line of mathematicians down to her.

[mustangcandi.livejournal.com]

OMG. Like rinkle said, what an intriguing idea! Love it.

[kitsunerei88]

Thanks! I think even if you go on to study math later, as a girl you usually get this message that you're terrible at it - I thought I was awful at math straight through until grade 10 or 11 or so, and even starting college I didn't think I was up to doing a math-heavy degree. Boy was I wrong.

Also, I was trying to weave in this idea that Amita was descended from Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who died young but came up with thousands of theorems and principles when he was alive, for which most have been proven true.

[ladygray99]

I really like the idea of Amita not being good at math and having to fight for the skills she has.

[kitsunerei88]

Math is hard, man. Even for people who end up being comparatively good at it later - success in math is more about an inability to let numbers beat you than it is about being smart, which Amita has in spades.