Does digress from Ramanujam's life quite a few times, with details on life in Britain, or the social customs of Brahmanical India etc. This book is very comprehensive, being not just the story of Ramanujam, but also a social biography of colonial India and war time Europe during the early 1900s. One can only wonder what he could have achieved had he lived a few more years. A meteoric rise to fame, FRS and fellowship to Trinity and a body of mathematical work that is still being studied and analyzed more than a 100 years later. In his short life, Ramanujam achieved a lot.

After a brief period of collaboration with Hardy in England and some brilliant individual effort back in India, Ramanujam passed away, at the age of 32. He had an unnatural flair for mathematics and nothing else! After a life a penury and struggle, with no one in India capable of even understanding if his work was brilliant or a just pure drivel, Ramanujam got the recognition he deserved when his papers reached the British mathematician Hardy. Ramanujam was born in a poor Tamil brahmin family and had little access to formal education. Robert Kanigel has put in a lot of effort researching material to write such a comprehensive biography of a genius from a century ago. Ramanujam is considered one of the best mathematicians of all times, in the same league as a Jacobi or Euler.Even though his work is well known within the mathematical community, outside of it, he is virtually an unknown quantity. Instead, i had to rely on metaphor for it to make any sense to me.Ī must read for anybody who is interested in Ramanujan, Mathematics, Hardy, Biographies or any good book. But i wished i was good enough at Mathematics to at least attempt to experience the beauty of it. I could understand the importance of Ramanujan's work, thanks to Kanigel's explanation. And i never regretted it anytime until i read some of the mathematical parts in this book. He succeeds in successfully recreating the early 20th century rural Tamilnadu as well as Ramanujan's isolation in war time England for the readers.

The author clearly researched his subject thoroughly. This biography by Robert Kanigel is a work of outstanding literary and scholarly accomplishment. There was a news about his last notebooks on mock modular forms being proven just last month. That mathematicians are trying to come to terms with his papers and notebooks to this day, is a testimony to his originality. He was a genius whose early death, owing to a multitude of factors not entirely in his control, was a tragedy too profound for tears, as someone said. 2013 December 22nd was the 125th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The man who knew infinity book