The Man Who Knew Infinity

My interest in films returned with more quiet time in the kitchen renovations. Not that the kitchen is finished yet, but we are now into cosmetics and my nervous system is coming slowly back to normal. I started to have better results in bridge and consequently I am back to enjoying it. I still have problems to concentrate on reading heavier books like Adam Phillips (I have his there books on my table waiting for better quality of my concentration) but seeing films is not beyond my current mental capacity, so went to see The Man Who Knew Infinity. I am glad I saw it as the film has not been screen for a long, two days later is off already. This may say something about its attractiveness, but I liked it and would recommend it but not to those who like action movies or love stories. Actually this film is about love but not necessarily romantic type even thought there is a bit of romance as well serving to highlight hero’s life priorities.

The film is about a self-taught Indian mathematics genius Srinivasa Ramanujan who traveled to Trinity College, Cambridge where he stayed five years surprising respectable and famous professors (like Bertrand Russell) with the depth of his conclusions to which he did not think it was necessary to supply proofs. The most involved and revolutionary mathematical theories came to him from nowhere. From God? Definitely from some higher power talking to his subconscious. This is the true story and Ramanujan really lived, albeit a short time and made serious discoveries in mathematical analysis and numbers theory. Most of his theorems have been proven by now and serve us somewhere in the scientific background of our every day life. This is deeply philosophical film, in my opinion, and the question of how Ramanujan  knew what he announced, in such profusion to the stunned professors at Trinity College, does not have an answer. The only answer that comes to my mind is that God exists and is active in our reason driven life. The story of Ramanujan is almost a mathematically based proof of that.

The film is also about an unlikely friendship of two people, an English mathematician G.H. Hardy and mainly self taught very unconventional Indian young man Ramanujan. Jeremy Irons who plays the English professor is absolutely wonderful in this role, but isn’t he in all his roles? He is to me. In this film he is more handsome than ever, but this is rather beside the point.

                                 

Dev Patel is good in his role, but somebody said that it is time he played a villain. I think there is something in it. He is a bit sugar coated in this role as well as he was in Slamdog Millionaire. I still liked his performance a lot, he is convincing playing a young man bewildered by other than his own realities. One can see his growing acceptance and resignation to it. 

One of my detours in life was studying pure mathematics for five years. I did not turn out to be a real mathematician, but these five years were useful and it gave me a powerful message – if I could do that, I can perhaps do almost anything else, it should not be harder than the five years of math. Maybe it was not a detour but an important part of my life education?

I got a glimpse of infinity when a professor presented us with a model of a universe being a circle without borders. My mind went into overdrive and this was my chance to understand the beauty of mathematics. I did not take this chance. Regrets? Maybe…

My talented student fellows were not your conventional people. They were forgetful, eccentric, and sometimes really strange. They loved music and they lost themselves in it. They loved mountain claiming risking and sometimes loosing their lives in the process. They dressed in a most strange fashion. Matching socks were a rarity with some. So when I read that G.H. Hardy was an eccentric, I did not agree with this opinion. He was about normal being a talented mathematician. This is how I know such people. What is in their minds is so absorbing that outside life is insignificant.

The film made an impression on me and woke up memories that had not surfaced for a long time. For me 10 out of 10, but this is a very personal rating.