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. In support of this project Kanigel was awarded an NEH Public Scholar award.Ģ013 December 22nd was the 125th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
His most recent book, "Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry," is a biography of the man who revolutionized our understanding of the Homeric epics. "Eyes on the Street," his biography of Jane Jacobs, the far-seeing author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and fearless champion of big-city life, was published by Knopf in 2016. Durkan Prize by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Kanigel's 2012 book, "On an Irish Island," set on a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland, was nurtured by a Guggenheim fellowship and later awarded the Michael J. "The Man Who Knew Infinity," his second book, was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and a New York Public Library "Book to Remember." It has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Thai, and many other languages, and has been made into a feature film, starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Robert Kanigel was born in Brooklyn, but for most of his adult life has lived in Baltimore.