The Man Who Knew Infinity is a biopic on renowned mathematician S. Ramanujan.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, undoubtedly one of the greatest mathematical minds of the last century, is not quite a household name in India. Not many of us know the inspiring life story of this great man, whose mathematical genius is helping fields as varied as computer science, astronomy and economics, a good century later.
The British movie The Man Who Knew Infinity is a fitting tribute to the Indian mathematician. It portrays the unusual relationship between two beautiful minds — S. Ramanujan who saw divinity in mathematics and G. H. Hardy, a Cambridge professor and atheist who refused to believe in what he could not prove.
Actor Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire-fame) essays the titular role of the self-taught math prodigy, while Jeremy Irons plays the Cambridge professor.
In 1913, Hardy receives a strange letter from an unknown man from Madras who was working as a clerk in a shipping company. The 10-page letter contained astonishing formulae and about 120 statements of theorems on infinite series, improper integrals, continued fractions, and number theory. Hardy’s initial scepticism is turned into absolute awe after he discusses the letter with his colleagues. Ramanujan is invited to England to explain his inventions, and thus begins an extraordinary journey of an Indian clerk who was struggling to make ends meet, into the scholarly echelons of hallowed Cambridge.
The film sensitively tackles the psyche of a Tamil Brahmin man of the early 20th century and the pain he feels as he struggles to survive in a foreign land, battling prejudice.
Ramanujan stayed in Cambridge for five years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, which was a rare honour. Sadly, the climate and the food there did not suit him, and he fell ill. When his health improved, he returned to India in 1919. But he fell ill again and died the following year, leaving behind just three notebooks and several letters packed with mathematical insights that have deeply influenced human thought, and continue to do so.
He was just 32.