The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity by Amy Alznauer

In 1887, Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in a small village in South India, by the banks of the Kaveri River. His mother whispered to him that prior to his birth, "the goddess Namagiri leaned down and whispered in your grandmother's ear that someday she would write the thoughts of God on your tongue." She decided to name him Ramanujan.

For the first three years of his life Ramanujan was silent. To help him, his grandfather would trace numbers in the rice and count aloud in Tamil. This led Ramanujan to being to speak. He would ask questions such as "What is small?" and "What is big?"

At five years of age, Ramanujan attended  a small school held on the porch of a house. He became bored and would often wander away.His mind was filled with questions like,  What else is small? 

He thought of a mango cut into smaller and smaller pieces, until there were infinite pieces. Ramanujan continued to be intrigued by numbers, big and small. 

In school he would scratch numbers furiously on his slate, irritating the school master who wondered what he was doing. Not surprisingly, Ramanujan hated school. After trying new schools every year, his parents finally sent him to Kangayan Primary.

While his schoolmates played goli gundu, Ramanujan spent his time after school on the front pial of his home, working with the numbers he loved so much. Numbers were everywhere for Ramanujan, in the songs his mother sang and in his dreams at night.

When he was ten years old, Ramanujan began attending Kumbakonam Town High School. There a schoolmaster finally recognized Ramanujan's gift with numbers. He had the ability to solve math problems quickly and although shy he entertained his classmates. Ramanujan found a college mathematics textbook and was able to solve all the problems. He began keeping a notebook which he used to write down his mathematical ideas in green pen. 

He loved to ask unusual questions such as "How many sums are inside two hundred?" and "Will an endless list of tiny numbers add up to 1 or infinity?" Unfortunately, Ramanujan failed college and returned home. He was twenty years old and had no job. His mother demanded he get a job and arranged a marriage for him. He eventually obtained work as an account clerk with Port Trust in Madras.

But still Ramanujan continued to work on his math problems. The British, working in Madras were convinced Ramanujan was brilliant and urged him to write a letter to Cambridge University, in England. After many letters and no responses, Ramanujan wrote to G. H. Hardy, a top mathematician at Cambridge who had studied the concept of infinity. Hardy was stunned by Ramanujan's ideas and urged him to come to England. In 1914, after praying in the temple, Ramanujan left behind his amma and appa, and his young wife and sailed to England. He brought with him his notebooks and his ideas which would change the study of mathematics forever.

Discussion

The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity presents the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan whose life was also the subject of the 2015 movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity. 

The author, Amy Alznauer has a direct connection to Ramanujan's story because it was her father who discovered Ramanujan's "Lost Notebook." As Alznauer writes in her Author's Note, she was six years old when she travelled to England with her father who was a mathematician. Her father was Professor George Andrews, attending a conference in England in 1976, and who was invited to look at some materials stored at the Trinity College Library belonging to the estate of the late G. N. Watson. Watson had been Mason professor of pure mathematics at the University of Birmingham and had spent ten to fifteen years studying Ramanujan's work. Professor Andrews found a collection of 138 pages containing over six hundred formulas in a box of materials. These pages he called "The Lost Notebook".

Andrews was a recognized authority on the work of Ramanujan and published papers on his work in the journal, Advances in Mathematics.  Alznauer is also a mathematics graduate who teaches calculus and number theory at Northwestern University.

The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity portrays Ramanujan as a boy obsessed with numbers. He spends all his time writing on his slate and rubbing the numbers off with his elbow so he can produce more formulas and numbers/ For Ramanujan, numbers "leaped and roared." As a child he saw numbers every where. "Numbers were everywhere. In the squares of light pricking his thatched roof. In the gods dancing on the temple tower. In the clouds that formed and re-formed in the sky."

Ramanujan is driven by his desire to understand numbers, and the concept of infinity. "If he could crack the number 1 open and find infinity, what secret would he discover inside other numbers? It felt like he was setting out on a grand chase." It is Ramanujan's personal relationship with numbers, a voyage of discovery that occurred every day, that Alznauer portrays to her young readers. In her Author's Note she writes, "Every morning when Ramanujan woke, numbers rose with the sun and spread to every corner of his mind. From the time he was a little boy, he learned mathematics not from books or teachers but by experimenting with numbers himself. He dusted off their bones and looked for their hidden structures. So I show him discovering ideas like primes and partitions and infinite sums even before he knew what to call them."

The author writes that she "focused on the development of Ramanujan's young mind and his struggle to be understood." In her portrayal, Ramanujan is shown as often being misunderstood as he spent hours with his slate, writing and working with numbers. Because of this he often faced challenges in school and even from the people around him.

For Ramanujan mathematics was an adventure, one that would ultimately lead him from India to England. As he grew older and his questions became more sophisticated, he developed formulas to help him answer those questions. And eventually he had the overwhelming desire to share his ideas about numbers. He wanted to seek out others who were also looking for answers. His experience in England gave him that opportunity.

Adding depth to Alznauer's portrayal of Ramanujan's extraordinary relationship with numbers, is the artwork of illustrator Daniel Miyares. Rendered in ink, the illustrations are colourful, capturing the wonder Ramanujan seems to have had with numbers.

The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity is recommended for those who are interested in science, and for use in STEM and math classes. Math is portrayed not as something to be feared, but as an exciting challenge. Ramanujan was considered a brilliant mathematician, and Alznauer's picture book offers readers a glimpse into life of possibly one of the greatest mathematicians ever.   

Book Details:

The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity by Amy Alznauer
Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press     2020

DVD: The Man Who Knew Infinity

The Man Who Knew Infinity tells the amazing story of Srinivas Ramanujan, a very gifted mathematician who made astonishing contributions to the analytical theory of numbers in the field of mathematics. The movie is based on the book, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel. In the movie, Ramanujan is portrayed by actor Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire).

Ramanujan was born December 22, 1887 in Erode, Madras Presidency in the British Raj. When Ramanujan was a small child he did not like attending school. He became interested in mathematics while attending Town High School where he came across a book, Synopsis of elementary results in pure mathematics by G.S. Carr. He was able to teach himself mathematics using this textbook. 

In 1904, Ramanujan attended Government College in Kumbakunan on a scholarship. However he lost his scholarship the following year because he devoted all his time to the study of mathematics and very little to other subjects. Eventually he left Government College and in 1906 he entered Pachaiyappa's College in Madras with the intention of passing the First Arts Examination so that he could attend the University of Madras. He failed the examination because he was only able to pass the mathematics portion of the exam and dropped out of school. Despite this, Ramanujan continued to work on mathematics; in 1908 he worked on continued fractions and divergent series and in 1911 he published a paper on Bernoulli numbers in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. This paper gained him the reputation as a mathematical genius in the Madras area. At this time in his life Ramanujan was struggling to survive as he had no paying job. He had married a ten year old girl, Jannaki Ammal in 1909 but they did not live together for several years.

Ramanujan was well known to many mathematicians in the Madras area and he was finally able to obtain employment as clerk in 1912 at the Madras Port Trust. In fact, the Chief Accountant for the Madras Port Trust was a trained mathematician and he clearly recognized Ramanujan's abilities. Eventually Ramanujan's work came to the attention of  G.H. Hardy, a resident at Trinity College, Cambridge when he received a letter from him in early 1913. Ramanujan had contacted various other professors in England without much success. However Hardy was most interested. Ramanujan's letter contained a long list of unproven theorems and Hardy wanted some proofs. Ramanujan desperately wanted to travel to England but he required a scholarship to do so. With Hardy's help he was able to obtain a scholarship for two years from the University of Madras and travelled to England from India in 1914.

Discussion

The Man Who Knew Infinity picks up Ramanujan's story in 1914 just before he leaves Madras for England. Dev Patel is cast as Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy is played by Jeremy Irons. This casting gives viewers the sense that Hardy was a much older mentor to the younger Ramanujan but in fact there was only ten years between the two men. The film beautifully portrays the gradual friendship and mutual respect that develops between these two men from vastly different cultures over the span of five years. In fact it is this wonderful capturing of the deep relationship between these two brilliant men that makes this movie so rewarding. 

At the beginning, Hardy is somewhat gruff and professional and it is the kindly encouragement of Hardy's colleague, John Littlewood that helps Ramanujan. But Hardy's open mindedness and his willingness to recognize the genius of Ramanujan and to help him, form the basis of a deep friendship and working partnership. Despite their common love of theoretical mathematics, Ramanujan and Hardy were very different. Ramanujan was a deeply religious man, a Brahmin who was a vegetarian. In contrast, Hardy was an atheist, who states in the movie that he doesn't believe in anything he can't prove. In a scene from early in the movie, Ramanujan questions Hardy for walking with an umbrella in bright sunshine. Hardy responds that "God and I don't exactly see eye to eye." but Ramanujan tells him "No sir. You believe in God. You just don't think He likes you." When asked by Hardy (and others) where he got his ideas, he often stated that they came from God. "You want to know how I get my ideas? God speaks to me...An equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God." Hardy works tirelessly to get Ramanujan elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and as a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. When Ramanujan decides to return to India and they say goodbye, Hardy tells Ramanujan he wants a letter each week with a new idea. The two men are now close friends and Hardy seems at a loss over Ramanujan's departure. Overlaying this scene is a sense that Hardy will never see him again in this life.

Srinivas Ramanujan

The film portrays Hardy's efforts along with his colleague John Edensor Littlewood (who is played by Toby James) to give Ramanujan the mathematical training he needs. Hardy is seen relentlessly insisting that Ramanujan must provide proofs of his theorems. Meanwhile, Ramanujan seeming to sense he is running out of time, is determined to see his work published.

In fact as World War I dragged on and the vegetables Ramanujan often ate became scarce, his health began to suffer. Ramanujan had previously been ill in India and in 1917 he became seriously ill in England. In the movie, he is seen frequently visiting the medical tents set up on campus for the injured soldiers sent back from the front in Europe. The film suggests that Ramanujan was thought to have tuberculosis, although the diagnosis of exactly what was wrong with him was never fully determined.

The Man Who Knew Infinity captures the historical period well, providing viewers with a sense of the obstacles Ramanujan faced upon arriving at Trinity, and the struggles his fellow mathematicians had in understanding and accepting him. Two mathematicians, Ken Ono and Manjul Bhargava were involved in the making of the film to ensure the mathematics was accurately portrayed. The movie was ten years in the making and premiered at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. Well worth the wait and definitely worth viewing.

This short biography of Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan from the MacTutor  History of Mathematics website is worth reading.

As shown in the movie and stated near the end, Ramanujan left a number of books and manuscripts containing his ideas and theorems, all of which have since been proven. Work on his ideas continues to this day as this article from Science Daily explains. This more recent article from + plus Magazine: Living Mathematics 2015 is also quite interesting.

Image credit: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#/media/Fichier:Srinivasa_Ramanujan_-_OPC_-_1.jpg