My only bone to pick about the movie is the way it depicts the discrimination and isolation Ramanujan must have faced when he was on the Cambridge University campus. The movie makes it clear that both intuition and rigor are important parts of mathematics. One of the main story lines in the movie is the tension that is created by Ramanujan’s untrained intuition and Hardy’s demand for rigorous proofs. One of the things that comes through in the movie is how intuitive mathematics is, Ramanujan revels that he believes that mathematics is about “writing down the thoughts of God”. The Man Who Knew Infinity makes mathematics a bigger part of the story. Will Hunting is an orphan who happens to be gifted in mathematics and is given an opportunity to utilize his potential when discovered by a MIT mathematics professor, while in A Beautiful Mind John Nash is a mathematician whose life is forever changed as he suffers from schizophrenia. In other movies about mathematicians such as Good Will Hunting, or A Beautiful Mind the heart of the story is about the people involved who happen to be mathematician. Ramanujan’s determination and self belief to defy the odds is inspiring while Hardy is brilliant but socially inept man who learns to become more humane. It is the uniqueness of these two characters that make this movie interesting. Hardy who in real life is only 10 years older than Ramanujan but is portrayed as being much older in the movie.

While at Cambridge Ramanujan was under the guidance of fellow mathematician G.H. “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is based on a biography (with the same title) written by Robert Kanigel about the life and academic career of Srinivasa Ramanujan an Indian mathematician with almost no formal education who earns admittance to Cambridge University where he makes extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

I wanted to watch the movie because I wanted to know his life story, how and why did he do mathematics? What struggles did he endure? What was he like as a person? I remember seeing a picture of Srinivasa Ramanujan in my math text book when I was a high school student and reading a small caption about him telling me that he was a brilliant mathematician who developed theorems despite having grown up in poverty without formal education. So when I saw the movie “The Man Who Knew Infinity” on Netflix I eagerly watched it. There are not many movies about mathematics or mathematicians and there are even less popular movies about the subject (Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind are a couple of examples).

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