“I’m what you’d call an atheist,” he tells Ramanujan, who replies, “No, sir, you believe in God - you just don’t think he likes you.” As in so many mainstream films, nonbelief here is depicted as a problem, a spiritual lack instead of a rational worldview mustn’t upset the multiplex audiences, after all.īut the film doesn’t dwell on it much. “It has to be held accountable.” But for Ramanujan, math is a matter of divine inspiration - an idea Hardy can’t quite grasp. “Intuition is not enough,” he tells Ramanujan. For a man of process and detail like Hardy, this is almost unthinkable. Ramanujan does all his equations in his head and is often unable or unwilling to show his work and include proofs with his formulas. Rather, it’s a clash between instinct and process. Much of the film is a typical culture-clash story, but it’s not just one of East versus West. Many of those around Hardy are skeptical of Ramanujan, jokingly referring to him as “Gunga Din.” But Hardy and Ramanujan also have some allies in Littlewood and Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam). And despite being a crusty intellectual who is awkward around people, the older Englishman shows surprising compassion and care for his younger colleague, who is unfamiliar with the highly ritualistic and fussy world of upper-level British academia. Soon enough, however, Hardy invites Ramanujan to Cambridge. Looking to find a place where he can pursue his passion, Ramanujan writes to the great Cambridge mathematician Hardy, who at first thinks the letter is a prank by his friend and colleague John Littlewood (Toby Jones). When he does finally find a job, as a clerk, his boss says that Ramanujan must spend evenings explaining to him the things in his notebook. He carries around a book of formulas he likens himself (humbly) to Galileo.
“The British think I’m a raving lunatic,” he mutters. (To be fair, it actually does briefly explain what the partition function is, but that’s about it.) When we first see Ramanujan (Dev Patel), he’s desperately poor and looking for work, unemployable because he has no degree. The Man Who Knew Infinity handles this problem by mostly sidestepping it.
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How, exactly, does a filmmaker represent that? How to make comprehensible something that by its very nature the rest of us will never understand?
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Ramanujan’s work - on the infinite series for pi and the partition function and, well, a whole host of things I can’t really describe - was apparently of immense importance. In part that’s because pure mathematics offers no tangible, material-world consequences to show, no momentous scientific experiments or life-changing works of art, just a bunch of numbers and formulas that happen to speak the secret language of the universe. But movies about math geniuses represent another level of difficulty entirely. The Man Who Knew Infinity sells the romance, but not the work. Still, many viewers might not be able to explain just what Ramanujan did, even after seeing the film. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) puts it in an early scene. So, if nothing else, Matthew Brown’s film will introduce audiences to the life of this fascinating thinker - “the most romantic figure in the recent history of mathematics,” as Ramanujan’s colleague G.H. That he’s largely unknown in the West is a shame. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician who in his brief time on this earth made seismic contributions to his field. Like The Imitation Game, The Man Who Knew Infinity is a Great Man biopic about a man most viewers have probably never heard of. Don’t get your hopes up - it only looks like a musical.