The Man Who Knew Infinity

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a fascinating biography of the brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. It is also a history of the astonishingly fruitful cross-cultural collaboration between this young, ill-educated mathematical genius and his mentor at Cambridge University, G. H. Hardy- a relationship that turned the world of mathematics upside down before it withered and died through a combination of Indian bureaucratic short-sightedness, superstition, English spiritual asceticism and the First World War.

Robert Kanigel, author of The One Best Way, tells this extraordinary tale, assessing the legacy of a man whose work contains some of the most beautiful ideas in the history of science, and whose major papers are still being plumbed for their secrets today.

It is a story of the clash of cultures between India and the West- between the world of Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in Kumbakonam in South India, where Ramanujan grew up, and the glittering world of Cambridge; between the pristine proofs of the Western mathematical tradition and the mysterious powers of intuition with which Ramanujan dazzled East and West alike.

It is a story of one man and his stubborn faith in his own abilities. But it is a not a story that concludes, Genius will out- through Ramanujan’s, in the main, did. Because so nearly did events turn out otherwise that we need no imagination to see how the least bit less persistence, or the least bit less luck, might have consigned him to obscurity. In a way, then, this is also a story about social and educational systems, and about how they matter, and how they can sometimes nurture talent and sometimes crush it. How many Ramanujans, his life begs us to ask, dwell in India today, unknown and recognized? And how many in America and Britain, locked away in racial or economic ghettos, scarcely aware of worlds outside their own?

This is a story, too, about what you do with genius once you find it. Ramanujan was brought to Cambridge by an English mathematician of aristocratic mien and peerless academic credentials, G. H. Hardy, to whom he had written for help. Hardy saw that Ramanujan was a rare flower, one not apt to tolerate being stuffed methodically full of all the mathematical knowledge he’d never acquired in India.

All his life, Ramanujan believed in the Hindu gods and made the landscape of the Infinite, in realms both mathematical and spiritual, his home. “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.”