The Man Who Knew Infinity. By Robert Kanigel

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Robert Kanigel

Abacus, London. First Published 1991

This is a well written, highly readable, clear eyed and clear headed look at Ramanujan, his all-too-brief life and his immortal work. It also follows the life of Hardy a great deal. The picture of Ramanujan that it builds is not of an idiot savant or of a man who was bewildered by his own brilliance. Ramanujan knew clearly just how good he was and how important and original his mathematics was. He however had some personality quirks that made him shirk quite a lot of his academic duties – such as obtaining a BA degree and then maybe an MA, and then going to Cambridge – something that would have been quite possible for him. It was just the selfish desire to  work only at maths, and to neglect all other subjects, that consigned him to a poverty-striken early life, that probably lead to his later sickness and the consequent tragic cutting short of his life – at 32! There is a sort of invetibility about his whole life, given the initial assumption of genius, and all what-if guessing games lead to the following conclusion. We must accept Ramanujan for what he was, fully, without crticizing one aspect of it, while standing awe-striken at another.

The other story in the book is that of Hardy. Though born of middle class (teacher) parents, Hardy soon acquired aristocratic manners, though his political and social views were of a decidedly left-liberal tinge – somewhat, I suppose, like J.D. Bernal, and maybe Dorthy Hodgkin. Kanigel does not say that it was this that made him more receptive to Ramanujan's letter than the others whom the latter first approached, but it is a possible interpretation of the events. Kanigel, however never loses sight of the fact that this is Ramanujan's story, and never gives Hardy more space than his apparent share of the encounter between the two. We come away with the idea that without Hardy, Ramanujan may have lived and died in near-obscurity, but certainly the greatness and importance of the maths he did would not have been affected. On the other hand, the best mathematics Hardy produced was only because of Ramanujan, in collaboration with the Indian, or following on his work or expanding it.

Kanigel has taken a great deal of effort to understand the social life of Madras and Tamilnadu of the time, but, of course, he writes about only those aspects that, to him, impinge directly on Ramanujan's life, or about which he has fairly strong evidence. It is a tribute to his writing skills that even with so little material, and having had, no doubt, to wade through a mass of eulogical and gushing accounts by Tambrahms on the greatest among them, he was able to write such a self-evidently unprejudiced account – Ramanujan is portrayed as an inexplicably and awesomely brilliant, but very human character.

Finally, I am gratified that the self-serving rantings of a certain Mylapore family, which used to be published regularly in The Hindu from about the 70s, and which claimed an almost clonal relationship with, and therefore ownership of Ramanujan, have been quietly ignored.