The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan in Science and Inquiry

May 12, 2022 Adam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mathematics

More of a 4.5

This book covers the history of one of the most alluring and mysterious figures in mathematics, Ramanujan. Most mathematicians are well aware of this character from history, but Robert Kanigel attempts to shed a much deeper light on the man's story. In this regard Kanigel did a wonderful job, although I think he gets rather a bit overly wordy at times. There are sometimes too much explanation to make a point, when it was simply said earlier and clearly. No need for several more flow More of a 4.5

This book covers the history of one of the most alluring and mysterious figures in mathematics, Ramanujan. Most mathematicians are well aware of this character from history, but Robert Kanigel attempts to shed a much deeper light on the man's story. In this regard Kanigel did a wonderful job, although I think he gets rather a bit overly wordy at times. There are sometimes too much explanation to make a point, when it was simply said earlier and clearly. No need for several more flowery metaphors. One thing this does take away for me, is that researching this story and writing this book certainly wound up being a labor of love for Kanigel. Just looking at the "research notes" section at the end of the book is daunting to say the least. I would wager this is probably the most comprehensive history on Ramanujan around.

For those who are not aware, though I can't imagine you've stumbled upon this book and not know... but just in case. Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician in the early 1900's. His career is absolutely non-typical. He had no interest in other subjects other than mathematics, so when he tried to attend university he swiftly flunked out due to ignoring his other courses. He is a man after my own heart in this regard, because it is the other coursework in university, especially plaguing the U.S. colleges that cause us to be distracted and limit our ability to specialize in a field... this hampers our ability to prepare for further study. This system is archaic and pointless. I understand the ideas of having a well rounded education, but people that have a well rounded education tend to have one by choice at the university level. In our society today, specialization in fields of interest is far more needed. If someone is interested in other topics, they will engage them of their own accord, in my opinion, and Ramanujan was living this out... to his own benefit and detriment.

Ramanujan is largely self taught, however, it is not like he had no access to higher mathematics, it was more the problem that he pushed the boundaries in such away that the mathematicians he was in contact with in India had no idea what he was talking about. It is true that he sorely missed out on having access to Analysis as part of his studies. Kanigel points out that as Ramanujan got deeper into the realms of math it was recommended he read a newer text on Analysis, but he was never able to aquire a copy of the book. This, invariably, hurt him when he made his way to England to work with G.H. Hardy. Hardy was obsessive when it came to proof and analysis, so he endeavored to teach Ramanujan as best he could. Hardy was well aquainted with the fact that intuition and what we may perceive as a pattern in the numbers may not hold true in general. Thus, Hardy endeavored to help Ramanujan prove his theorems and formulas. Some of which, such as his prime number theorem, were wrong. But, a lot of his material was correct and therein lies the allure of Ramanujan.

It is certainly true that the formulas that were easy to prove have been proven, but some of the things Ramanujan came up with were outright baffling. It turns out they were correct and challenge in proving them was incredible. Some mathematicians would spend over a year trying to prove one of his assertions. Some would require newer and more modern fields to prove what Ramanujan knew decades after Ramanujan wrote it down. This is the real allure of Ramanujan, the sheer mystery behind how he knew what he did. While Kanigel throws open the question at the end of the book with "was it mystical?" I have to disagree. I think Ramanujan was just a prodigious calculator and pattern recognizer. He would spend hours and hours thinking really hard about all this material he was able to find the patterns he was looking for. I don't think this is something that can be taught, mind you, I think he was anamolous in the sense that his mind just predisposed him this ability, it got obsessed with this particular aspect of the world and just ran with it.

It is truly ashame he died so young, because we can only sit here and imagine the avenues of mathematics he could have brought us all down. Where would mathematics be today if he had lived even another ten years? Towards the end of his life he was brushing up against even more advanced topics and there probably would have been no real end in sight.

In the end I quite enjoyed the book. It even has a large amount of pictures to help document the story as well. I really appreciate this careful work and am glad it was included in the book. I definitely appreciated Kanigel's scholarship and the clear effort put into the story and if you are at all curious about Ramanujan and his work with G.H. Hardy from an historical perspective more than mathematical, then this is certainly a worthy read.

I should mention they also made a movie out of this book and it is a very good movie. However, the movie takes some serious liberties with the time frame. It tries to condense all of Ramanujan's life into a mere two hours, which really isn't possible. One of the major liberties they took was with the ages of the characters. In reality Hardy wasn't even 40 when he met Ramanujan, however, the movie casts Jeremy Irons as G.H. Hardy and Irons is well over 40 at the time of this filming. It seems the move tried to go with the "old professor" vibe throughout the film, when in reality a good portion of the people involved were quite young. I can forgive them for this, because Jeremy Irons did an absolutley wonderful job at portraying Hardy. Everything I have read about the man makes me think that Irons did him serious justice. Dev Patel was cast to play Ramanujan, and while Ramanujan is described as being rather heavy in weight in the book... Dev Patel is very skinny. However, again, I can look beyond this because Dev did such an incredible job playing Ramanujan. After reading this book and getting insight into Ramanujan's personality, I think he really brought the man to life again. There are some liberties and embelishments of his time at Trinity, but I think these are made for dramatic effect and an attempt to condense his five years there into the time span of a single film. In any event, I quite enjoyed the movie even if it has some rather serious inaccuracies compared to what I just read in this book. ...more

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Aug 22, 2023 Pam Shelton-Anderson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, science

I had first read about Ramanujan in a long-ago article in Omni magazine (yes that long ago). I had read snippets about him since, but decided to try this dedicate biography. I liked that the author explicitly did not want to focus on the bio to the exclusion of the math or vice versa (and I love math). This was a very interesting journey of an amazing individual who had such natural genius for mathematics in spite of (or perhaps, because of) no formal training in it during his youth. While his l ...more

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