That Englishness, though, is sometimes depicted in a puzzling fashion. There is, in fact, a great sense of Englishness to the film, simply owing to the effective use of the real Trinity College. Hardy, almost alone among his colleagues, recognizes the genius in Ramanujan's notebook but presses him to take a more traditional approach and work out the lengthy proofs behind his flashes of intuition.Īnd that's as close to a plot as you'll find in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of Ramanujan's five-year struggle to make peace with the British establishment at Trinity. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), who invites him to London's Trinity College at Cambridge University. like Galileo," he tells a roommate) but eventually, he manages to bring his work - several hundred pages of advanced equations - to the attention of G.H. A compulsive but unschooled mathematician, he can't find a job worthy of his skills in India ("I'm doomed. We first see Ramanujan, earnestly portrayed by Dev Patel, in Madras in 1914, kneeling on the sidewalk chalking equations.
Of course, my assumption of innumeracy could be a misjudgment based on my own limitations, since the film's poster quotes the London Mathematical Society as saying that it "outshines Good Will Hunting." We are told that higher mathematics came to Ramanujan as a kind if vision - "I don't know, I just do," he declares - and the filmmakers hope that we'll recognize his passion even if we can't don't understand its inspiration. When we see Ramanujan's notebooks, which contain hundreds of pages of complex formulas, we're invited to view them only as a pattern, a formal design. The makers of The Man Who Knew Infinity, a biopic of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, realize that they're dealing with one of those dancing-about-architecture subjects that most viewers will find unfamiliar, so they try not to wallow in details.