FILM REVIEW

The Man Who Knew Innity :

A Report on the Movie
by George E. Andrews

The Man Who Knew Innity

The Man Who Knew Innity (Animus Films, Edward R.
Pressman Film, Exit Strategy Productions (Music Services),
Firecracker Entertainment, in association with Xeitgeist
Entertainment Group). Matthew Brown (director), Jeremy
Irons (as G. H. Hardy), Dev Patel (as Ramanujan).

In September 2015, The Man Who Knew Innity was shown

on three successive days at the Toronto International Film
Festival. The movie tells the story of the Indian genius,
Photo courtesy of Pressman Films.

Ramanujan. I had the good fortune to be able to attend

each showing.

I will begin with a brief summary of Ramanujans life

for those who are not familiar with the details. Ramanujan
was born in poverty in southern India in 1887. He was
a mathematical prodigy. After success in high school,
he lost his scholarship at the Government College at
Kumbakonam because he cared only about mathematics
and neglected some of his other subjects. On his own, Math consultant Ken Ono (left) coaches Dev Patel as
he discovered (and rediscovered) amazing theorems. He Ramanujan.
eventually contacted G. H. Hardy in 1913, in a letter that
began as follows:
Dear Sir, The letter did include many results (all without proof)
I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the including:
Accounts Department of the Port Trust of Madras
on a salary of only L20 per annumAfter leaving 1 2 4 5 + 5 5 + 1
= ( )
school I have been employing the spare time at my 1+ 1+ 1+ 2 2

disposal to work at MathematicsI am striking out
and
a new path for myselfI would request you to go
through the enclosed papers. Being poor, if you are 1 25 45
convinced that there is anything of value I would =
1+ 1+ 1+
like to have my theorems publishedYours truly, S.
Ramanujan 5 5 1 2
5
5
2
5 3 2
51
1 + 5 ( 2 ) 1
4
George E. Andrews is Evan Pugh University Professor in Math-
ematics at Pennsylvania State University. His email address is Years later in writing about Ramanujan [2, p. 9], Hardy
gea1@psu.edu. stated of these two results: I had never seen anything
For permission to reprint this article, please contact: in the least like them before. A single look at them is
reprint-permission@ams.org. enough to show that they could only be written down by
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1349 a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true

178 Notices of the AMS Volume 63, Number 2

 because, if they were not true, no one would have had the in 2014. A play, titled A Disappearing Number, based on
imagination to invent them. Finally (you must remember Ramanujans life, toured in professional theaters and was
that I knew nothing whatever about Ramanujan and had presented at the International Congress of Mathemati-
to think of every possibility) the writer must be completely cians in Hyderabad in 2010. However, The Man Who Knew
honest, because great mathematicians are commoner than Innity is the rst major American/British movie devoted
thieves or humbugs of such incredible skill. to the story of Ramanujan.
Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to come to England in There are many good things to say about the lm.
1914. The resulting collaboration transformed much of Matthew Brown, who both wrote and directed the movie,
number theory. In 1918, Ramanujan became very ill. In relied on expert mathematical advice from Ken Ono
1919, his health improved somewhat, and it was felt that and Manjul Bhargava. Consequently, the mathematical
he might benet from a return to India. Unfortunately his portions of the movie ring true. If one is looking for a
health then deteriorated, and he died in 1920. mathematical message, I would say that the importance
Hardy, in his Twelve Lectures on Ramanujan [2, p. 1], of proofs in mathematics plays a major, convincing role.
begins by describing the diculty in unraveling the You might require the students in your class to attend
mystery of Ramanujan: for this reason alone.
However, what makes this such an appealing movie is
I have set myself a task in these lectures which
the development of the relationship between the unso-
is genuinely dicultI have to form myself, as
phisticated Indian genius, Ramanujan, and the very aloof
I have never really formed before, and to try to
British academic don, Hardy. On top of this, we have
help you to form, some sort of reasoned estimate
several underlying themes that complicate and intensify
of the most romantic gure in the recent history
their interaction. There is the tension produced by the
of mathematics; a man whose career seems full of
fact that Ramanujans wife remained in India. World War
paradoxes and contradictions, who dees almost
I breaks out after Ramanujan arrives in Cambridge. The
all the canons by which we are accustomed to
passions of war lead to racism directed at Ramanujan, to
judge one another, and about whom all of us will
hostility toward the pacist Hardy, and to the dismissal
probably agree in one judgment only, that he was
of Hardys friend and fellow pacist, Bertrand Russell,
in some sense a very great mathematician.
from Cambridge. It is a monumental task to weave these
While the enigma of Ramanujans genius may never be disparate threads into a seamless screenplay. Matthew
fully understood, Ramanujans life story is told in The Brown has beautifully managed to do just that.
Man Who Knew Innity, the excellent biography by Robert
Kanigel [3]. Now Matthew Brown has made a movie of the
same name based on Kanigels book.
There have been a number of documentaries on Ra-
manujans Life. Channel 4 in Britain produced Letter
From an Indian Clerk in 1987. An extended version of
this program was presented by NOVA under the title,

Photo courtesy of Pressman Films.

The Man Who Loved Numbers. More recently the Indian
Institute for Science Education produced The Genius of
Ramanujan, and an Indian movie, Ramanujan, appeared

Jeremy Irons (left) playing G. H. Hardy and Dev Patel,

Photo courtesy of Pressman Films.

playing Ramanujan.

The nale of the movie chooses to emphasize Ramanu-

jans triumphs. Prior to his return to India, he was elected
a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity
College. Ramanujans premature death after returning to
India is handled softly with Hardy receiving the tragic
news in a letter. I found these choices for the ending
of Ramanujans life to be exactly right. It would have
Left to right: Producer Edward Pressman, Jeremy been easy to dwell on Ramanujans slow demise back in
Irons (Hardy), Dev Patel (Ramanujan), Ken Ono (math India, and this would have been an unnecessarily jarring
consultant), Matthew Brown (director), and actress conclusion.
Sorel Carradine. Since I am writing this article for mathematicians, many
of whom will know much of Ramanujans story, I must

February 2016 Notices of the AMS 179

stress that this is not a documentary. Some characters are Matthew Brown via Skype, and, as a result, my name
older than they were in real lifee.g., Janaki (Ramanujans appears in the Thanks Also To list in the credits. For
wife) and Hardy. Certain time compressions occur. What these reasons, I have termed this article a report rather
is important to me in a biographical movie is whether the than a review. I sincerely hope that every mathematician
story is true in general terms. There are no moments in goes to see this movie, and I hope you enjoy it as much
this movie when one feels that a person or event is being as I did.
seriously distorted.
As an explicit example of acceptable poetic license,
consider the famous 1729 story told by Hardy:
I remember once going to see him when he was
lying ill in Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No.
1729, and remarked that the number seemed to
me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was

Photo courtesy of Vladimir and Mariana Tonchev.

not an unfavorable omen. No, he replied, it is a
very interesting number; it is the smallest number
expressible as a sum of two cubes in two dierent
ways.
The movie, in choosing not to dwell on Ramanujans
lengthy convalescence in England, inserts this story in a
scene where both Hardy and Ramanujan are out in the
street with Hardy arriving in cab 1729. Subsequently 1729
reemerges in an amusing exchange between Hardy and
Littlewood.
The pioneering combinatory analyst, Major P. A. MacMa-
hon, has an important part in the movie. Since I edited
MacMahons Collected Papers for the MIT Press [4], I
watched this role with great interest. Actually I was
George E. Andrews
delighted by the rst seemingly implausible interaction
between MacMahon and Ramanujan. MacMahon chal-
lenges Ramanujan to give the square root of a quite
large integer. Ramanujan responds correctly after some References
hesitation and has to correct his result with a few added [1] G. E. Andrews and B. C. Berndt, Ramanujans Lost Notebook,
Parts IIV, Springer, New York, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013 (Part V
decimal places. Ramanujan then asks MacMahon to square
in preparation).
the original number which he does with lightning speed.
[2] G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan, Cambridge University Press,
MacMahon is triumphant at having won the contest. Cambridge, 1940 (Reprinted: Chelsea, New York, 1962).
Surely you are wondering why this story would please [3] R. Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Innity, Scribners, New York,
me. After all, this must be pure fantasy and unlike any 1991.
interaction of serious mathematicians. In fact, this is a [4] P. A. MacMahon, Collected Papers, Vol. 1, G. E. Andrews ed.,
fairly accurate account of history. According to Gian- MIT Press, Cambridge, 1978.
Carlo Rota in his introduction to Volume I of MacMahons [5] S. Ramanujan, The Lost Notebook and Other Unpublished
Collected Papers: It would have been fascinating to be Papers, Narosa, New Dehli, 1988.
present at one of the battles of arithmetical wits at
Trinity College, when MacMahon would regularly trounce Editors Note: See also the story about Ken Onos experi-
Ramanujan by the display of superior ability for fast ences helping with the lm, as told by Adriana Salerno in
mental calculation (as reported by D. C. Spencer, who the AMS blog PhDPlus: blogs.ams.org/phdplus/2014/
heard it from G. H. Hardy). The written accounts of the 09/01.
lives of these characters, however, omit any mention of
this episode, since it clashes against our prejudices.
In closing, I have to confess that I am hardly a dis-
interested observer. Ramanujans mathematics has been
of central importance in my career. I wrote my PhD the-
sis on Ramanujans mock theta functions. This, in turn,
eventually led to my stumbling onto Ramanujans Lost
Notebook in 1976 [5]. I have spent the last decade collabo-
rating with Bruce Berndt on ve volumes providing proofs
of the results in the Lost Notebook [1]. I attended the
Toronto screenings with my daughter Amy, who is writ-
ing a childrens picture biography book about Ramanujan
forthcoming from Candlewick. My direct connection to
the movie is minimal. I had a lengthy conversation with

180 Notices of the AMS Volume 63, Number 2