![]() ![]() The story of Ramanujan in the film begins in India, just before the events at Cambridge. The movie opens with Hardy recounting how his work with Ramanujan was the most romantic incident in his life, whose source is a well-known quote of his from decades after Ramanujan’s death. The amazing thing is that the formula works not just for a small number like 4, but any positive integer no matter how large. The formula is asymptotic: while not giving the precise value, the formula gets more and more accurate as n tends to infinity. Ramanujan and Hardy gave a beautiful expression for p(n) for any integer n. We can express this succinctly as p(4) = 5, as there are five ways to paritition 4. A partition of a positive integer n is one way of writing n as a sum of positive integers. One important example of his work referenced in the film is Ramanujan’s joint work with Hardy on parititions. Number theory is a discipline within pure mathematics which considers forms and patterns within the integers. He produced a small handful of published papers, but discovered thousands of results in his field of number theory. He died tragically of complications from tuberculosis at the age of 32 in 1920. Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, a small town outside Madras (now Chennai) in southern India. But to be honest, this was the movie I was waiting for at the festival. I set my expectations low…heaven forbid, another “passion project” at TIFF. The Man Who Knew Infinity gave me that feeling last night at its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). On occasion, I am blown away by a film, and walk away feeling like this is why movies are made. Hardy, an atheist, struggles with this view, but comes nevertheless, to trust his deep belief in Ramanujan’s undeniable genius. They come in dreams and as answers to prayers. He responds that pure mathematical ideas express the thoughts of God. Hardy (played by Jeremy Irons) asks Srinivasa Ramanujan (played by Dev Patel) where his profound mathematical discoveries come from. In a pivotal scene of The Man Who Knew Infinity, G.H. Many other reviews are out there now, but I thought it might be interesting to read one written by a mathematician. I absolutely adore this movie, and am eager to take my mother and friends to see it. I was lucky enough to see this at TIFF last September. Stay tuned next Wednesday, May 18 for my interview with Maria Chudnovsky. This is a special blog post today, as I usually post on Wednesdays. As The Man Who Knew Infinity goes into wide release in theatres here in Canada on May 20, I am re-blogging my review of the movie. ![]()
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