The Man Who Knew Infinity Full Movie Free

[Ara Kistner]

Thefilm makes only fleeting references to the antithetical belief systems of Ramanujan and his mentor, Professor Hardy. The conflicts between the intuition-driven genius who was a devout Hindu and the proof-obsessed professor who was an atheist remain unexplored and underexploited in the film. Dev Patel, playing Ramanujan, struggles to look profound and inspired. But Jeremy Irons, as Professor Hardy, succeeds in packing the right combination of passion and precision, keeping a stiff upper lip until the final scenes of the movie when he melts into his most human instincts, delivering a powerful and poignant mixture of admiration and affection for his protg.

Ramanujan deserves a lot more tribute and recognition than this film is likely to bestow on him. And yet, this film is an honest homage and it deserves a hearty applause. After all, as mathematicians know, half of infinity is still infinity.

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The movie The Man Who Knew Infinity is about Srinivasa Ramanujan, who is generally viewed by mathematicians as one of the two most romantic figures in our discipline. (I shall say more about the other romantic later.)

The work he did after returning to India in 1919 is contained in the misleadingly named Lost Notebook. It was lost and later found in the Wren library of the leading college for mathematics of the leading University in England. While in England Ramanujan became the first Indian Fellow both of Trinity and of the Royal Society.

Ramanujan had an extraordinary ability to see patterns. While he rarely proved his results he left a host of evaluations of sums and integrals. He was especially expert in a part of number theory called modular forms which is of even more interest today than when he died.

The lost notebook initiated the study of mock theta functions which are only now being fully understood. Fleshing out his Notebooks has only recently been completed principally by American mathematicians Prof Bruce Berndt and Prof George Andrews. It comprises thousands of printed pages.

An old Indian friend, Swami Swaminathan, oversaw the Ramanujan Library in Madras over half a century ago. He commented that had Ramanujan been born ten years early he would have been unable to receive the education and financial assistance that made his pre-Cambridge work possible.

Swaminathan went on to say that had Ramanujan been born ten years later, he would have probably received a more robust and more ordinary education. In either case our version of Ramanujan would not exist.

There is one famous anecdote about Ramanujan that even a non-mathematician can appreciate. In 1917 Ramanujan was hospitalised in London. He was said to have tuberculosis but it is more likely this was to cover a failed suicide attempt.

It is this note which has led to the legend that Galois spent his last night writing out all he knew about group (Galois) theory. This story appears to have grown with the telling but his life would also make for a very interesting movie.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is screening, Wednesday November 18 2015, at selected cinemas in Adelaide, Brisbane, Byron Bay, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney as the closing movie in the British Film Festival.

Today I had the chance to see the new biopic called The Man Who Knew Infinity. While nothing too spectacular it is a solid inspirational true story about someone I knew nothing about before seeing the film.

Infinity stars Dev Patel as real-life mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Madras, India but had a knack for numbers and mathematical formulas. He even believed the formulas came as visions from God to him, and he knew he needed to share them with the world.

Ramanujan meets a professor named GH Hardy played by Jeremy Irons (I guess this is his year for biopics with already appearing in Race). The two men become friends despite their cultural and religious differences. Ramanujan is all about the new idea while Hardy encourages him to find the proofs behind the inspiration.

In a new film now out on Netflix and iTunes, The Man Who Knew Infinity, Dev Patel plays math genius Srinivasa Ramunujan. From a town in India and with limited formal training in mathematics, Ramunujan made contributions to Number Theory and infinite series that are still used by mathematicians today. After Ramanujan drafted letters to leading mathematicians at Cambridge University, he spent nearly five years in Cambridge studying with famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy before he tragically contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of 32.

Karl Mahlburg: Mathematics is a basic language of science. This means that we cannot describe, measure, or understand natural or scientific phenomena without using mathematical language. When a mathematician discusses "infinity," this is not just an abstract idea, but rather refers to a way of modeling large-scale or long-term behavior.

So yes, one of the reasons that Ramanujan is often referred to as "the man who knew infinity" is that he demonstrated incredible skill in understanding these limiting behaviors. For example, he developed a theory for efficiently constructing very large networks on which it is easy to communicate; today these are known as "Ramanujan graphs" (see below). Modern mathematicians continue to be amazed that Ramanujan was able to develop his incredible insights while working in isolation, without access to even a major library, let alone modern computers!

Karl Mahlburg: In one sense, this quote is simply meant to illustrate the character of a brilliant mathematician like Ramanujan - that he is constantly driven to seek meaningful patterns and order in the world. However, this quote also has a deeper purpose, which is to highlight that the development of mathematics has always been intertwined with applications in other sciences, industry and military.

For example, some of the early developments in calculus arose from attempts to mathematically model the trajectories of cannonballs and other ballistics on the battlefield, where it is vital to understand the effects of a small change in angle or the amount of gunpowder. As another example, although an unexpected storm can still ruin plans, weather forecasting has actually improved significantly in recent decades. And this is mainly due to significant advances in mathematical modeling of turbulent systems, rather than improvements in radar.

Karl Mahlburg: A famous quotation of Thomas Alva Edison states that "[g]enius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." This is absolutely true of mathematics, where the "inspiration" might involve a feeling that a striking claim is true (say, that there are infinitely many prime numbers) and the "perspiration" involves writing down a proof, which is a careful logical argument that will convince any other scientist of its truth beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The "inspiration" is what Ramanujan was referring to, as it can be tedious and painstaking to record mathematical results in a formal proof. Mathematics is a living, active science - for example, no one would have thought to ask questions about efficient ways to transmit data over a network of a billion computers before the development of the internet, and this has led to rich developments in the mathematical field of Graph Theory. "Inspiration" is certainly still a vital part of mathematics!

Karl Mahlburg: I think Ramanujan's basic life story contains an inspiring message for anyone, scientist or not. He was a man of humble origins and limited opportunity, but he had an unbreakable passion for mathematics. Moreover, he had the courage to leave his home and sacrifice everything for his dream, which resulted in him becoming one of the greatest mathematicians history has ever known.

Karl Mahlburg: Ramanujan's contributions to mathematics absolutely remain relevant today. His highly original ideas inspired entire mathematical research areas throughout the twentieth century, including Additive Number Theory, Modular Forms, Integer Partitions, and Graph Theory. For example, mathematicians have recently used "Ramanujan Graphs" (which are based on his ideas) as a model for network communication, which has led to more efficient data transfer on the internet.

Ramanujan has also certainly had a large influence on me personally; almost all of my mathematical activities owe a debt to Ramanujan. I have also had the great privilege of visiting Kumbakonum, India as an invited speaker at a conference in Ramanujan's honor. While there we visited Ramanujan's home, which is now a museum, as well as the Hindu temple where he devoutly spent many hours, frequently doing mathematics on his small slate. It was very humbling to have a first-hand view of the circumstances of Ramanujan's life, and also inspiring to realize that I could nevertheless share in his mathematics.

It is a famously difficult problem to find the prime factorization of a very large number such as 234,177,800. Even with today's fastest computers, it is almost impossible to factor a 100-digit number in a reasonable amount of time.

Number Theory continues to be an area of active research because these simple ideas from arithmetic have proven to be fundamentally important for modern computer security and cryptography, which is the study of secure communication and secret codes. In short, the data that you store on your computer or enter into a website on the internet (such as a credit card number) is typically represented by a large number. In order to safely transmit this data, it is "encoded" by performing a mathematical operation similar to multiplying by very large prime numbers. As mentioned above, it is very difficult for a hacker to factor this product and recover your data, but (with some additional mathematical theory) it is actually possible for your bank, for example, to have a secret factorization "decoder" so that your financial data is communicated.

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