![]() ![]() Kanigel ( Apprentice to Genius ) gives nontechnical readers the flavor of how Ramanujan arrived at his mathematical ideas, which are used today in cosmology and computer science. His book 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and named a New York Public Library 'Book to Remember' it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Cut off from his young Indian wife left at home and emotionally neglected by fatherly yet aloof Hardy, Ramanujan returned to India in 1919, depressed, sullen and quarrelsome he died one year later of tuberculosis. Over the next five years, the vegetarian Brahmin who claimed his discoveries were revealed to him by a Hindu goddess turned out influential mathematical propositions. ![]() ![]() Struck by the Indian's genius, Hardy, member of the Cambridge Apostles and an obsessive cricket aficionado, brought Ramanujan to England. After 13 years as professor of science writing at MIT, he has returned. In 1913 Ramanujan, a 25-year-old clerk who had flunked out of two colleges, wrote a letter filled with startlingly original theorems to eminent English mathematician G. Robert Kanigel is the author of six other books, including The Man Who Knew Infinity. This moving and astonishing biography tells the improbable story of India-born Srinavasa Ramanujan Iyengar, self-taught mathematical prodigy. ![]()
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