“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. 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.
The man who knew infinity movie online watch series#
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. Facing this with a family back home determined to keep him from his wife and his own declining health, Ramanujan joins with Hardy in a mutual struggle that would define Ramanujan as one of India’s greatest modern scholars who broke more than one barrier in his worlds.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. Forced to leave his young wife, Janaki, behind, Ramanujan finds himself in a land where both his largely intuitive mathematical theories and his cultural values run headlong into both the stringent academic requirements of his school and mentor and the prejudiced realities of a Britain heading into World War One. Hardy, who invites him to further develop his computations at Trinity College at Cambridge. Eventually, his stellar intelligence in mathematics and his boundless confidence in both attract the attention of the noted British mathematics professor, G.H. In the 1910s, Srinivasa Ramanujan is a man of boundless intelligence that even the abject poverty of his home in Madras, India, cannot crush.