‘Infinity’ is a story of obsession and sacrifice
Review
The next time you’re at a party, try asking the person next to you who Srinivasa Ramanujan is. They’ll either come up blank or ditch you to talk to someone more coherent.
One theory is that the history books failed Ramanujan, a certifiable genius from Madras, India (now Chennai) who made his mark in the field of pure mathematics in the early 1900s before succumbing to illness. He died at the young age of 32.
The Man Who Knew Infinity is the touching biopic, starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, that aims to remedy any such ignorance. Based on the Robert Kanigel novel of Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel in The Man Who Knew Infinity.
the same, it highlights the opposites attract friendship between Ramanujan (Patel) and G. H. Hardy (Irons), the English theorist who is both stumped and exhilarated by his discoveries.
Hardy, an alum at Trinity College, Cambridge, keeps to himself and doesn’t believe in Dev Patel on the red carpet at Diff. anything he can’t prove, including the existence of a higher power. In sharp contrast, Ramanujan is a devout Hindu, who makes a gruelling journey from India to get his work published, and relies on God and intuition alone to come up with his equations. Together, they form an unlikely pair, whose differences fuel their brilliance.
You won’t come away from Infinity understanding more about continued fractions or, as the name suggests, the infinite series. But you’ll get a feel for some of the scarring sacrifices Ramanujan had to make in order to prove his contributions, such as leaving his mother and wife behind and facing racist attacks in Second World War England.
Patel, an English actor of Indian origin, steps into the role of the ambitious, cash poor genius seamlessly, while Irons, also English, makes for a compelling counterpoint. Their performances are credible and understated as they portray two lonely men who find common ground in their obsession with numbers.
At the core of the movie, though, is the story of what happens when you have to give up a good thing in the pursuit of another, hopefully bigger one. As Patel’s Ramanujan puts it, when a fellow passenger to England points out the magnitude of their 6,000 mile voyage: “I’ve known greater numbers.”
And yes, those numbers may have cost him more than he can count. But at the end of his groundbreaking journey, they certainly paid off, too. — M.H.