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What it argues
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 in the South Indian town of Erode into a Brahmin family of modest means, received almost no formal mathematical training, and by his mid-twenties had filled notebooks with thousands of mathematical formulas, many of them original results that professional mathematicians would spend decades verifying. Robert Kanigel's biography reconstructs how this happened, and what happened next — Ramanujan's extraordinary correspondence with Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy, his five years in England from 1914 to 1919, and his death at 32.
The biography works as two interwoven stories. One is Ramanujan's: his early mathematical obsessions, the poverty that repeatedly interrupted his education, his deep religious conviction (he attributed many results to his family goddess Namagiri), and the social and physical dislocation he experienced in cold, wartime Cambridge. The other is the context: what British India looked like in the early 20th century, how Cambridge mathematics worked, how Hardy — himself a celebrated mathematician and an atheist who regarded Ramanujan's religious explanations with polite bafflement — navigated the mentorship of someone whose working methods he couldn't fully understand.
What it gets right
- 1.
Ramanujan produced thousands of original mathematical results with almost no formal training, suggesting that mathematical intuition can exist independently of formal mathematical education.
- 2.
Hardy's decision to invite Ramanujan to Cambridge was based on a letter containing formulas Hardy found undeniably original — a case of mathematical quality being recognizable across vast cultural and institutional distance.
- 3.
The Hardy-Ramanujan collaboration produced significant mathematics in number theory, infinite series, and partition theory, including results that took decades to prove rigorously after Ramanujan intuited them.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Robert Kanigel is an American journalist and author of several books on science and biography. He has taught science writing at MIT and the Johns Hopkins University and has contributed to publications including the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and Civilization magazine. The Man Who Knew Infinity, published in 1991, is his most widely read book and the basis of a 2015 feature film starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. His other books include The One Best Way (1997), a biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
