When we first meet him in The Man Who Knew Infinity, Srinivasa Ramanujan is furiously chalking equations onto the paving stones of a Hindu temple. He might have continued working out advanced math problems with only the Hindu pantheon as his audience if he hadn’t written to one of the eminent mathematicians of his day, G.H. Hardy. A Cambridge University don, Hardy greeted the letter from an unknown Indian with aristocratic disdain until he glanced at the enclosed equations. Recognizing immediately that this was the work of a highly original mind, Hardy arranged Ramanujan’s passage to England in the months before the outbreak of World War I.
Math is hard to do on film but The Man Who Knew Infinity crackles with the excitement of the field when it advances beyond the arithmetic of everyday life into the calculus underlying reality. Based on Robert Kanigel’s biography of Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity stars Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) as the Indian prodigy whose work continues to astonish mathematicians (he is said to have anticipated superstring theory, among much else). Patel depicts him with fidelity as shy yet determined, a fish out of water at Cambridge who must swim upstream against the prevailing currents of racial prejudice and the smug satisfaction of mainstream science, whose minions at the turn of the last century believed all mysteries were solved and nothing was left to discover. Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune) co-stars as Ramanujan’s mentor, Hardy. He is portrayed as coldly sympathetic, a cerebral man who understood numbers better than people—but understood them well enough to know that his Indian protégé was onto something.
The film accurately distills the dynamic between Ramanujan and Hardy into a clash of worldviews—not merely East versus West or India against Britain, but polytheism against atheism and intuition versus reason. Hardy demands proofs for Ramanujan’s theorems against the young Indian’s insistence on the power of creative inspiration (he claimed visions from Hindu deities as the source for many of his groundbreaking ideas). Ramanujan saw lengthy trains of mathematical equations in his head, much as Mozart is said to have heard entire symphonies before setting the notes on paper.
The Man Who Knew Infinity is a well-wrought biography of a brilliant figure who remains little known outside his own field. Although writer-director Matthew Brown trims reality to fit a two-hour format and allows the orchestral score to swell in key with the emotions, he has done fine work getting at the essence of Ramanujan and his outstanding insights. He is aided in every scene by a great cast.
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Dev Patel
Jeremy Irons
Directed by Matthew Brown
PG-13
