The Man Who Knew Infinity tells the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician whose contributions to number theory, continued fractions, and infinite series revolutionized the field.
The Man Who Knew Infinity
The 2016 New York Indian Film Festival kicks off with Matt Brown’s film The Man Who Knew Infinity, a true story of friendship that forever changed mathematics. In 1913, Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), a self-taught Indian mathematics genius, traveled to Trinity College, Cambridge, where over the course of five years he forged a bond with his mentor, the brilliant and eccentric professor G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), and fought against prejudice to reveal his mathematical genius to the world. The film also stars Devika Bhise, Stephen Fry and Toby Jones. This is Ramanujan’s story as seen through Hardy’s eyes.
Thus began one of the most productive and unusual scientific collaborations in history, that of an English don and an impoverished Hindu genius whose like has never been seen again. Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to sail for England, leaving behind his wife and other in Madras. Ramanujan’s isolation from his family and the intensity of his work eventually took their toll, and within seven years of leaving India he was dead. For Hardy the collaboration with Ramanujan was “the one truly romantic incident of my life.”
Robert Kanigel’s achievement is not simply to make Ramanujan’s science accessible, but to show the pleasure, the excitement, and the love of numbers that inspired it. Here is a life and a life’s work that resound a century later, a testimonia to the truth that genius can flower in the most unlikely places, and a biography with all the drama, the richness, and the cultural sweep of a fine historical novel.
There will be a post-screening discussion with Director Matt Brown, Executive Producers Annie Pressman and Swati Bhise, lead Actor Devika Bhise, and Nobel Laureate Manjul Bhargava immediately following the film.
The event takes place Monday, April 25, 2016 at 6:00 PM at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY.
