Book review: The Man who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius, Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

By Shorba Harkhu

In the prologue to his book, Kanigel (1991) refers to Ramanujan as a mathematician so great it transcends jealousies. He further refers to Ramanujan as one superlatively great mathematician whom India has produced in the last thousand years. But who is Ramanujan?

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on the 22^nd December 1887 in Erode, in present-day Tamil Nadu (India). Born into poverty and brought up according to the customs and traditions afforded to a Brahmin Hindu, he was somewhat of a child prodigy. By the age of ten, he was challenging his teachers in the matters of mathematics.  He also exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who were lodgers at his home. Although he had no formal training in pure mathematics, he soon developed sophisticated theorems of his own. He quickly filled reams of notebooks containing his theorems and formulae.

Ramanujan soon began writing to leading mathematicians at Cambridge University, with samples of his work.

A Cambridge mathematician named Godfrey Harold Hardy responded to Ramanujan’s letter and invited him over to Trinity College in Cambridge. Ramanujan spent nearly five years in Cambridge collaborating with Hardy and another mathematician, John Edensor Littlewood.  He published twenty-one papers during this period. No doubt, Ramanujan would have found it difficult to adapt to the cold climate, the western clothes as well as the diet. Hardy’s and Ramanujan’s collaboration was a clash of cultures, beliefs, and working styles. While Hardy was an atheist, Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, attributed his mathematical ability to the gods.

In March 1916, Ramanujan was awarded a Bachelor of Arts by Research degree (the predecessor of the PhD degree). After many trials and tribulations, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the first Indian to hold this honour. He returned to India where he sadly died of tuberculosis at the young age of 32.

Kanigel (1991) asserts that even decades after his death, Ramanujan’s theorems are still being applied in areas such as polymer chemistry, computers, even (it has recently been suggested) cancer, scarcely imaginable during his lifetime. And always the nagging question: What might have been, had he been discovered a few years earlier, or lived a few years longer? (Kanigel, 1991)

This book, while steeped in historical fact is an excellent read. If you want to know more about this relatively unknown mathematician, then this book is for you.

 

Reference

Kanigel, R. 1991. The Man Who Knew Infinity: a life of the genius, Ramanujan, New York: C. Scribner's.