http://www.ithaca.com/entertainment/number-theory-exploring-the-passion-of-pioneering-mathematicians/article_5f68a126-1799-11e6-a6ac-0b29dbd1b3dc.html
Number Theory: Exploring the passion of pioneering mathematicians
By Bryan VanCampen | Posted: Friday, May 13, 2016 6:00 am
The Man Who Knew Infinity, written and directed by Matthew Brown, opening at Cinemapolis May 13.
I love when a movie teaches me about a time and culture that I knew nothing about, and I learned a lot from Matthew Brown’s The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on the book of the same name by Robert Kanigel.
No one should ever substitute a film for a trip to the library when it comes to studying history, but this story stretches from India to the United Kingdom just before the outbreak of World War I. Above and beyond the build up to war, there’s a lot of great material, smart, fascinating characters and an underlying passion for knowledge that makes the film feel bigger and fuller than the conventional BBC bio-pic. Not for nothing, but the film opens with a lovely quote by Bertrand Russell about the beauty of mathematics.
The film stars Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) as Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematician who after growing up poor in Madras, India, earns admittance to Cambridge University during World War I, where he becomes a pioneer in mathematical theories with the guidance of his professor, G. H. Hardy (played by Jeremy Irons). Here is a man who seems to be able to process and analyze numbers with an almost holy fervor. At his job in India, Ramanujan never uses his abacus because he says his brain works faster.
The film was actually shot at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at one point of the film, Irons as Hardy takes Ramanujan on a campus tour and shows him the tree where Isaac Newton was (supposedly) hit on the head, along with the important documents and papers accomplished by Trinity alums on display in the libraries. Bertrand Russell is a character here, played by Jeremy Northam; I remember Northam’s brief Hollywood hunk phase in the mid-90s, and it’s nice to see him cast all that off and become the character actor he was always meant to be. Toby Jones co-stars as John Edensor Littlewood, another Trinity Fellow in the field of mathematics.
While some at Trinity are more supportive than others, the film is really about the relationship between Hardy, the atheist, an emotionally buttoned-down Irons who’s all about doing the grunt work of proofs for every single equation, and Patel as Ramanujan, the impassioned idealist who sees all the numbers in his head, so why should they be incorrect? Hardy starts out quite tough on his protégé, but as they spend time together, argue and begin to learn about each other, he becomes quite taken with him, referring to their time together as the most romantic period of his entire career.
Brown’s film is largely disciplined and unsentimental about the inherent racism and tentative nature of Hardy’s “experiment” in accepting Ramanujan at Trinity. Not only did he experience resentment and condescension from some of the faculty and students, which certainly escalated when the war broke out, but back in India, his mother (Arundhati Nag) hid all his letters from his wife Janaki (Devika Bhise), who came to believe that her husband had abandoned her. So damage was done on both sides, although the Trinity College staff comes off as insensitive, to say the least, and racist to say the most.
Best of all, Patel plays the impassioned student as a geeky, emotionally open vessel, while Irons is careful not to allow Hardy’s emotional reticence to dribble over into the usual bio-pic sloppy sentiment. At its core, it’s about two men who loved what they did, even as they didn’t understand how the other man did what he did. This is good, smart and involving stuff. •
All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt. (Charles M. Schulz)
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