- THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY MOVIE ACCURACY MOVIE
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THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY MOVIE ACCURACY LICENSE
Some dramatic license was taken, for instance in having Jeremy Irons play Hardy as a much older man than he actually was when he met Ramanujan. For some more about the film from an expert on Ramanujan’s work, the AMS Notices have this from George Andrews. The book is an excellent source for the story of Ramanujan’s life, and Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology is something everyone should read (for one thing, it’s short). The filmmaker was inspired by Robert Kanigel’s excellent 1991 biography of the same name (he says his mother gave it to him to read, she had it through her book club). The story of Ramanujan is one of the great romantic stories of mathematics, with a large part played in it by the Cambridge mathematician G. It was extremely good, infinitely better than the most recent high profile film about a mathematician, the one about Turing (see here).
THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY MOVIE ACCURACY MOVIE
How about a Wes Anderson comedy starring Jeff Goldblum as Erdős? I’d watch it.Last night I went to see a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival of the new movie about Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity.
![the man who knew infinity movie accuracy the man who knew infinity movie accuracy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity_(film).jpg)
I’d love to see a mathematical film break this mould, and suggest that producers grab a copy < The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, the biography of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős.Īn eccentric rogue, he travelled the world living out of a suitcase, turning up at fellow mathematician’s doors and demanding to stay while they worked on proofs together, and referred to god as the “Supreme Fascist” who kept the best mathematical ideas to himself. The Man Who Knew Infinity isn’t bad, it’s just safe, cramming Ramanujan’s colourful life into a well-established, sellable format.
![the man who knew infinity movie accuracy the man who knew infinity movie accuracy](https://images.livemint.com/rf/Image-621x414/LiveMint/Period2/2016/04/30/Photos/theman-kju--621x414@LiveMint.jpg)
That’s not really a surprise since mathematician Ken Ono, who has made a career of studying Ramanujan’s notebooks, served as a consultant on the film.
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The film does deserve praise for avoiding the manic chalkboard scenes and strained analogies that often dog mathematical movies – in one scene, Hardy naturalistically scribbles a few paper notes on a concept called the partition function, explaining it to his butler as a real human being would. “I don’t think about this the same way you do!” Ramanujan rages at Hardy during one argument over the need for proof, before later explaining, “an equation has no meaning to me unless it expresses a thought of god.”īut it wasn’t really Ramanujan’s religion that set him at odds with the mathematical establishment, merely his lack of training in their traditions. Perhaps it’s because it serves as the spine of the film, highlighting his unlikely pairing with staunch atheist Hardy.
![the man who knew infinity movie accuracy the man who knew infinity movie accuracy](https://anthonybonato.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/man-who-knew-infinity-poster.jpg)
It may be that I’m over-familiar with Ramanujan’s story, having read both The Man Who Knew Infinity and Hardy’s memoir A Mathematician’s Apology numerous times, but I was exasperated that this religious element was held as the big reveal of the film, when Ramanujan’s actions already made it obvious that he was a deeply spiritual man. Ramanujan, it turns out, was a rare genius who could simply intuit dense mathematical concepts, although he credited his family goddess Namagiri for his ideas and claimed she appeared to him in dreams.
THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY MOVIE ACCURACY FULL
More interesting is the mathematical clash of cultures he encountered – his notebooks full of equations lacked the rigorous proof demanded by Cambridge dons, and he struggled to understand why such arduous steps were necessary.