Destructive forces of East and West combine to crush the flower of
genius in this brilliantly realized biography of a self-taught,
turn-of-the-century mathematician. Kanigel (Literary
Journalism/Johns Hopkins) is the author of Apprentice to Genius
(1986). Born in 1881 to humble circumstances in a southern Indian
backwater, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar received little
encouragement in his growing obsession for mathematics - fueled
particularly by his discovery of a 40-year-old math book written by
an English tutor. Nevertheless, Ramanujan began compulsively
filling his own notebooks with scribbled mathematical theorems,
heedless of the fact that he was flunking out of one after another
of the area's universities, all designed by the British to train
native administrators rather than cultivate Indian genius. At age
26, unemployable, misunderstood, and desperate for sponsorship,
Ramanujan mailed a sample of his work to eminent young British
mathematician G.H. Hardy, initiating what would become one of the
surprising discoveries of 20th-century mathematics - Ramanujan's
brilliant, still insufficiently plumbed understanding of the nature
of numbers. Greatly impressed, Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to join
him in Cambridge, where the Indian enjoyed the joys of subsidized
intellectual labor and international appreciation at the price of
giving up the daily spiritual sustenance provided by his own
culture. The trade-off proved too much. Prevented from returning to
India once WW I began, cut off from the spiritual element he'd
always integrated into his mathematical theories, and with only
ascetic atheist Hardy for company, Ramanujan went into a steep
physical and spiritual decline. Seven years after his arrival in
England, he died - at age 33. Kanigel's particular interest in how
primitive superstition, India's bureaucratic mind-set, English
spiritual asceticism, and a Western war combined to destroy the
miracle of Ramanujan's genius adds deeper dimensions to the already
fascinating story of a difficult but astoundingly fruitful
cross-cultural collaboration. (Kirkus Reviews)
In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the pre-eminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realising the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled.
With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, 'the Prince of Intuition,' tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, 'the Apostle of Proof'. In time, Ramanujan's creative intensity took its toll: he died at the age of thirty-two and left behind a magical and inspired legacy that is still being plumbed for its secrets today.
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