The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Hardcover

Kanigel, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684192594 ISBN 13: 9780684192598

Publisher: Scribner, 1991

Synopsis

A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest mathematicians

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Kanigel is the author of six previous books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Grady-Stack Award for science writing. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Harvard Magazine, and Psychology Today. He has just retired as Professor of Science Writing at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts and now lives in Baltimore.

From Publishers Weekly:

This moving and astonishing biography tells the improbable story of India-born Srinavasa Ramanujan Iyengar, self-taught mathematical prodigy. 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. H. Hardy. Struck by the Indian's genius, Hardy, member of the Cambridge Apostles and an obsessive cricket aficionado, brought Ramanujan to England. 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. 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. 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. BOMC featured alternate; QPB alternate.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0684192594
• ISBN 13: 9780684192598
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 438