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

Lines, Bars and Circles: How William Playfair Invented Graphs by Helaine Becker

Lines, Bars and Circles tells the story of the eccentric William Playfair. 

William Playfair was a dreamer with an annoying sense of humor. When his father died, Will's education was taken over by his older brother John who moved back to the family home near Dundee, Scotland. William liked to play practical jokes, but with John as his teacher he soon became and excellent mathematician like his brother.

A dreamer, Will found himself restless and left home when he was fourteen with the intention of making his fortune. He found a job with Andrew Meikle, an inventor. But he left this job after a few years to become an assistant to James Watt.

This new position inspired William to try to dream up his own inventions, but this made him make mistakes on the job.He soon left Watt and decided to start his own business using a machine he developed. This machine made objects out of silver and William opened a shop to sell them. The shop failed.

Undeterred, William tried many different ventures, writing, making cannon parts for the British army and starting a bank. Sometimes his schemes got him in to trouble with the law.

In spite of all this, William continued writing and his books earned him a living. For one of those books, he needed something to show the information he was trying to portray. He created the first line graph to do this. The line graph made it easier to see what the data. King Louis XVI was impressed by Williams graphs and he rewarded him with a royal permit.William wanted to use this permit to "build a steam-powered rolling mill that would manufacture all kinds of objects out of steel." But before he could do this, Louis was overthrown.

Because of his bad reputation, scientists refused to endorse William's graphs. Instead, it would be almost one hundred years before they were rediscovered.

Discussion

Lines, Bars and Circles gives readers a fun and engaging treatment of the life of William Playfair who is credited with developing line and bar graphs as well as the pie chart. Illustrator Marie-Eve Tremblay's digitally created artwork adds humour to this telling of what might be a somewhat dry subject for children.

William was born on September 22, 1759 to Reverend James Playfair, a minister in Liff, Scotland. His father died in 1772 when William was twelve-years-old. This meant his older brother John had to care for William and his younger and older brothers. John would go on to become a respected scientist,  Professor of Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Geology at Edinburgh University. 

After completing his schooling, William undertook an apprenticeship with the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle. He then became the personal assistant and draftsman for the illustrious James Watt at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham in 1777. After this, William began the first of several business ventures over the years, most of which, would fail. 

In 1787, he moved to France to try to make his fortune there. He was involved in numerous "adventures" in revolutionary Paris, eventually fleeing France for Germany in 1791. He returned to London where he started a bank which also failed. William then earned his living as a political and economic writer. It was in these writings that he began to make his points with the use of line graphs and bar charts. These illustrations had never been used before. His Commercial and Political Atlas, published in 1786 was the first demonstration of these new techniques. The first pie charts were used in his 1801 Statistical Breviary.

As Becker writes in her note on William Playfair, "More About William and His Charts", William's ideas were lost for almost a hundred years partly because of his reputation as a "scoundrel". During the time period he lived, a person's reputation was very important and William's was not good. Becker's light-hearted text along with Tremblay's modern, funny illustrations make for an interesting read. 

Lines, Bars and Circles is a welcome addition to a suite of picture books that have been written in the last few years on mathematical concepts. This picture book could be used to give students some context to one of the most important mathematical tools we use today to portray data in an understandable form. It's helpful for students to understand how specific mathematical tools such as line graphs and pie charts were developed. Even better if it is done in a way that makes math fun!

Book Details:

Lines, Bars and Circles by Helaine Becker
Toronto: Kids Can Press   2017