12/24/2022 0 Comments The man who knew infinity movie budget![]() It’s almost inevitable that a researcher who goes into territory where no one has gone before will misread certain signs, jump to wrong conclusions, and take some mis-steps. Genius is about incisive originality, not infallibility. Genius isn’t about always being right.Īs the film makes clear, Ramanujan’s intuition didn’t give him 20/20 vision into the mists of mathematical reality in particular, his work on prime numbers contained errors. And yet his turned out to be one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century.ĥ. Racism no doubt played a role too Ramanujan didn’t look like English mathematicians’ internalized picture of what a mathematician was. After all, Ramanujan had no academic credentials beyond an unfinished college degree. It’s easy to see why other English mathematicians would have succumbed to the temptation to dismiss Ramanujan. Hardy wasn’t the first English mathematician with whom Ramanujan attempted to establish a connection Hardy was merely the first to take him seriously. Genius can come from anywhere, and it doesn’t always arrive equipped with credentials. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I would have been able to come up with on my own.Ĥ. It was an intricate proof, too we talked about it for several days, and I still didn’t understand all the details. A younger mathematician (from India, as it happens) was the one who did most of the hard work of designing a proof that would do the job. A recent paper of mine took over ten years to come to fruition from the start my original collaborators and I knew in a heuristic sense why a certain result ought to be true, and we had computer evidence that it probably was true, but we didn’t have an airtight proof that it had to be true. People have different strengths, and research can benefit from multiple talents and perspectives. In the film we see two mathematicians working together, an image often missing from popular portrayals of mathematical research. Once we get really good at doing something, we set our sights a bit higher and try to do something a bit harder but still (we hope) within our powers. Of course there are some active researchers who find a narrow vein of expertise and mine it for years in a low-key, whistle-while-you-work way, but most of us frequently step out of our comfort-zones. Such struggle, less anguished but just as strenuous, is I think the norm for productive mathematicians. The film shows Ramanujan’s struggle to find proofs of his insights that will satisfy his collaborator Hardy and the rest of the mathematical establishment. ![]() Doing research in math isn’t easy, even for great mathematicians. His desire to find others who see those colors impels him to leave her and all the other people he knows and loves, to seek his destiny in England in 1914.Ģ. Early in the film, in talking to his wife about the artistic side of math, Ramanujan resorts to metaphor, speaking to her of his formulas as paintings composed of “colors you cannot see”. Math is a creative endeavor that can evoke esthetic delight.Īctor Dev Patel, bringing Matt Brown’s script to vibrant life, conveys the sense of beauty that Ramanujan finds in his pursuit of mathematics. Here are some characteristics of mathematics that you’ll learn about from the movie:ġ. Official movie poster for “The Man Who Knew Infinity”. (I’m going to assume that you’ve read my blog essay Sri Ramanujan and the Secrets of Lakshmi from last month, or that you already know something about the life and work of Ramanujan.) 9999 × … and learn what it has to do with Ramanujan’s story. Along the way, you’ll meet the surprising base-ten expansion of the infinite product. I’m not saying that the film in and of itself is inaccurate, but it does recycle some tropes about mathematics that you’ve probably seen in other movies about mathematicians and that give an inaccurate picture of mathematics. If I knew as much about movie-making as Matt Brown does, I probably would have made the same choices he did.īut I am going to tell you, fellow-members of the movie-going public, what characteristics of the math life are conveyed by the film, and what characteristics aren’t. So I’m not going to tell Matt Brown, the writer/director of “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, what he should have done differently in a movie that, as the fine print on the poster reminds us, is merely based on the life of Ramanujan. During my years as a mathematician, not one film-maker has tried to teach me how to write better articles.
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