And the trajectory of his tragic life, even if one is initially unfamiliar with it, is all too predictable long before he starts having “Camille”-style coughing fits.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Too much is made of Ramanujan’s puppyish love for the wife he left behind in India (as if the film needed a romantic angle to snare us). Patel, best known from “Slumdog Millionaire,” is a frisky, engaging performer, but he never convinces as someone for whom numbers were sacred. But this core is eclipsed by Brown’s gentlemanly, once-over-lightly approach. The film’s core is the deep friendship that developed between Hardy, the tweedy Oxbridge atheist, and his devoutly religious disciple, who believed that his equations expressed thoughts from God.
Toiling in a series of accounting jobs, he worked feverishly on his theorems and managed to get them to Hardy, the famed University of Cambridge professor who alone among his colleagues recognized Ramanujan’s genius from the start and, in 1914, brought him to Trinity College. Ramanujan was born into a poor Brahmin family and showed an extraordinary aptitude for mathematics early on, making intuitive intellectual leaps for which he often only later supplied proofs. (A novel, an Indian biopic, and multiple plays about Ramanujan have previously appeared.)
It’s a conventional movie about a most unconventional subject. Ramanujan’s life is such a gold mine of intellectual and cultural complexity that this well-intentioned but tepid movie, loosely adapted from the eponymous 1991 Robert Kanigel biography, is doubly disappointing. I wonder what that scientist would have made of writer-director Matthew Brown’s “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” starring Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as his mentor, British mathematician G.H. The scientist asked me why no one had ever tried to make a movie about Ramanujan, who grew up poor in Madras, India, and died at age 32 in 1920 after having attended the University of Cambridge and revolutionized mathematical thought with theorems that still have resonance today. Working closely with Hardy, Ramanujan makes a series ofīreakthroughs and challenges the Englishman's atheism.Around the time that “Good Will Hunting” came out, I had occasion to chat with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist about the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who is referenced in that film. To indulge his fascination with prime numbers. JT ones), recognise Ramanujan's raw talent and encourage the Indian Thankfully, a few scholars, such as John Edensor Littlewood (Toby Masters, including Professor Howard (Anthony Calf ) and Major McMahon In rarefied surroundings, he encounters jealousy from students and Tearful farewell to his new wife and travels by sea to the hallowed seat Hardy invites the bank clerk to England to nurture his gift.Īgainst the wishes of his controlling mother, Ramanujan bids With the blessing of his employer, Sir Francis Spring (Stephenįry), Ramanujan sends some of his mathematical musings to reveredĪcademic GH Hardy (Jeremy Irons), a fellow at Trinity College, CambridgeĪlongside Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam). Ramanujan (Dev Patel) is a 25-year-old shipping clerk in 1914 With "a rabbit hole mystery of the universe". We can share in Ramanujan's frustrations and triumph as he wrestles Time in illuminating the daunting challenge in layman's terms, so Only once, on the subject of partitions, does the script invest Secrets were and how the lead character was instrumental in ploughing
Sadly, Brown's film fails to make clear exactly what these Mind, who conjured solutions out of the ether. Which extols its remarkable subject, Srinivasa Ramanujan, as a beautiful It's a glowing tribute, written and directed by Matthew Brown,
Mathematician, who came to England just before the First World War to Infinity is a handsome dramatisation of the life of a self-taught Indian Universal language which transcends race, religion, culture and class.Īdapted from Robert Kanigel's 1991 biography, The Man Who Knew
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MLA style: "THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY." The Free Library.