Volume 38, Number 20 · December 5, 1991
In The Jungle of the Infinite
By Ian Stewart
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
by Robert Kanigel
Scribner's, 438 pp., $27.95
Godfrey Harold Hardy was a pure mathematician and the archetypal Cambridge don: fellow of Trinity College, unmarried, his life a mixture of research, cricket, and college society; his features so finely chiseled that C.P. Snow described his face as 'beautiful.' He was eccentric in a disarmingly English way: he abhorred telephones and waged a quiet but very personal vendetta against God. Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was born into a poor Brahmin family, contracted smallpox at the age of two, flunked out of college twice, went through an arranged marriage with a girl of ten, and was described by Ramachandra Rao as 'a short, uncouth figure, stout, unshaved, not overclean.' He was a Hindu, as all Brahmins are, and worshiped the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal. It is hard to imagine two people more unlike each other. Yet their lives became so strongly entwined that it is difficult to mention one without, in the same breath, referring to the other. The Man Who Knew Infinity is really a biography of them both, although Ramanujan takes pride of place: perspicacious, informed, imaginative, it is to my mind the best mathematical biography I have ever read.
Review, 3744 words
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