The Man Who Knew Infinity

Destructive forces of East and West combine to crush the flower of genius in this brilliantly realized biography of a self-taught, turn-of-the-century mathematician. Kanigel (Literary Journalism/Johns Hopkins) is the author of Apprentice to Genius (1986). Born in 1881 to humble circumstances in a southern Indian backwater, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar received little encouragement in his growing obsession for mathematics - fueled particularly by his discovery of a 40-year-old math book written by an English tutor. Nevertheless, Ramanujan began compulsively filling his own notebooks with scribbled mathematical theorems, heedless of the fact that he was flunking out of one after another of the area's universities, all designed by the British to train native administrators rather than cultivate Indian genius. At age 26, unemployable, misunderstood, and desperate for sponsorship, Ramanujan mailed a sample of his work to eminent young British mathematician G.H. Hardy, initiating what would become one of the surprising discoveries of 20th-century mathematics - Ramanujan's brilliant, still insufficiently plumbed understanding of the nature of numbers. Greatly impressed, Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to join him in Cambridge, where the Indian enjoyed the joys of subsidized intellectual labor and international appreciation at the price of giving up the daily spiritual sustenance provided by his own culture. The trade-off proved too much. Prevented from returning to India once WW I began, cut off from the spiritual element he'd always integrated into his mathematical theories, and with only ascetic atheist Hardy for company, Ramanujan went into a steep physical and spiritual decline. Seven years after his arrival in England, he died - at age 33. Kanigel's particular interest in how primitive superstition, India's bureaucratic mind-set, English spiritual asceticism, and a Western war combined to destroy the miracle of Ramanujan's genius adds deeper dimensions to the already fascinating story of a difficult but astoundingly fruitful cross-cultural collaboration. (Kirkus Reviews)