The Man Who Knew Infinity, by Robert Kanigel
Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was born in 1887, in Southern India. Srinivasa was his father's name, and Iyengar referred to the particular branch of South Indian Brahmins to which his family belonged, and so he was simply known as Ramanujan.
Sometimes you read about someone so incredibly gifted that you wonder where the world would be if they had never been born. Mozart blessed us with music. Einstein transformed the world of physics. Ramanujan's gift was mathematics.
On January 16, 1913 he wrote a letter to G.H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge. It began:
"Dear Sir,
I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only 20 pounds per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics."
His letter went on to describe his desire to study at Trinity College, and was followed by nine pages of mathematical theorms.
Hardy showed the letter to his friend Littlewood, also a mathematician at Trinity. At first they thought the equations might be the work of a prankster, but after several hours of pouring over his writings, they realized they were examining the works of a mathematical genius.
Ramanujan ended up in Cambridge with Hardy, and Robert Kanigal describes in detail the adjustments and disappointments he faced, coming from a very poor part of India and trying to fit into modern academia.
Sadly, he died April 26, 1920 of tuberculosis.
Reading this book will acquaint you with Ramanujan the man, and Ramanujan the genius. The book has a lot of math in it, but the story line continues around the math, so if you are like me, you can gaze at the equations in awe for a moment, and then get back to the story of the man.
However, if you like math, you will appreciate both the story and the mathematics.
