Hacker Cinema
The Man Who Knew Infinity
2016 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Matt Brown
Growing up poor in Madras, India, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar earns admittance to Cambridge University during WWI, where he becomes a pioneer in mathematical theories with the guidance of his professor, G.H. Hardy.
16 positive5 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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25 comments on Hacker News
I don't think they do hate it, any more than they hate "A Beautiful Mind" which is a pale shadow of Nash's real life, or "The Man Who Knew Infinity" about Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Breneditch Cumbersome's interpretation of Turing in "the Imitation Game" or any other mathematician in film. "Hidden Figures" was a wreck. So what!
They think "yea, thats not very real" and then in a Gell-Mann Amnesia moment pass over the other aspects of film which are utter bullshit, but filmicly necessary like camera pans through walls, 32 year old people playing high school kids, you-name-it.
"that artifact should be in a museum" my arse. Archeologists would be lamenting the lack of contextual work mapping the scene before you disarm the rotating knives, the implicit cultural burdens mis-understood, the grim reality of funding to get a crystal-scull hunting project up in the first place.
It is purely academic... or is it?
G. H. Hardy's autobiography was titled "A Mathematician's Apology" because he, somewhat jokingly, wanted to apologize for a life of pure math... totally academic and completely useless.
Then a few years after he passed away, his math was key for The Manhattan Project to build the first successful nuclear bomb. His math lead to the device that changed the world and affected every aspect of human life for a century.
It's only "useless" until someone finds a "use".
P.S. The book documents his time with Ramanujan. If you liked the film "The Man Who Knew Infinity", you should read Apology
The film that prompted this is "The Man Who Knew Infinity"[0], a film based on Ramanujan's[1] work as a mathematician.
I think it's a fabulous film. It's fiction, but it captures a lot of truth about mathematician's and how they work.
FWIW, Bollobás[2] supervised my PhD, and Ramanujan was spoken about regularly, including Erdős's[3] opinions, so I have some insight.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bollob%C3%A1s
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
"The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan" By: Robert Kanigel
A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest mathematicians
There is also a movie with this same name. It was good, IMHO.
The Man Who Knew Infinity
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0787524/
The Man Who Knew Infinity [1]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0787524/
I enjoyed the movie on The Man Who Knew Infinity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity
> The Man Who Knew Infinity
A very good film. I will seek it out again.
The Man Who Knew Infinity is pretty good, more accurate than some of the others on here. It focuses on Hardy (Jeremy Irons) and Ramanujan (Dev Patel). I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a good period drama with a good cast and nice sets. It's a very pleasant movie all around. It's not perfect but far better than others I've seen, like A Beautiful Mind, which I found painful to watch all those years ago.
The scene is depicted in the film "The Man Who Knew Infinity", highly recommended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity
A Trip to Infinity - https://www.netflix.com/watch/81273453
And not a documentary, more of a biopic, but the Ramanujan movie "The Man Who Knew Infinity" was pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity
There have been many, many films made about Srinivasa Ramanujan. I'd particularly recommend the 2015 one, The Man Who Knew Infinity, I found it super charming.
Since we're talking movies, I'll throw in a handful of movie titles that I find inspirational and /or uplifting as well:
Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa
Vision Quest
Tin Cup
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Social Network
Rad
Hackers
Wargames
Iron Man
The Man Who Knew Infinity - based on the book of the same name, which I also recommend.
I'd also recommend Genius, a mini-series focused on Einstein.
Let's do a mathematics movie list too. I'll start:
+ The Man Who Knew Infinity - Ramanujan and Hardy + A Beautiful Mind - John Nash + The Imitation Game - Turing
The Man Who Knew Infinity on the life of the mathematician Ramanujan is a fantastic movie.
This is not a terrible piece on Ramanujan (though I highly recommend the book on which the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity is based on), but every time I read about him, I feel an incredible sense of awe. Ramanujan is possibly the most classic version of an “inituistic genius” in every way. His contributions and constructions are as magical as they are mysterious, and I would love to understand even 1% of what was going on in his mind.
Even reading about von Neumann (another of the giants), I still feel like he is “human” in the sense that his abilities feel like something a truly seven-sigma smart person should be able to do. Ramanujan, on the other hand, feels like a magician of the highest caliber: things just came to him (as religious visions, etc.) that were true. It’s as if I wrote down every equation appearing in a dream and then had all of them be perfectly true. (Spoiler alert: many of the equations that come to me in dreams are thoroughly nonsensical.) It’s so... unheard of and incredible, that I still struggle to even begin to understand.
Anyways, this turned into a long rant, but my point is that I believe everyone should know a little about Ramanujan to understand truly how brilliant humans can be. (And, at least in my case, be continually humbled.)
Thank you, that clears it up further. I recently saw the movie “the man who knew infinity” and so it got me thinking about this meta questions.
I really enjoyed the Man who knew Infinity by Kanigel. Seemed to capture the flavor of Cambridge at the time. It's a movie too, but I haven't seen it.
Remember 1729 being referenced in the 2015 film The Man Who Knew Infinity which was essentially a Hardy retrospective on his relationship with Ramanujan. YouTube actually has a 25 sec. clip of that scene from the movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4y6uFdcOM
Slightly OT but it's well worth watching the recent film about Ramanujan, "The Man Who Knew Infinity".
It has kept me thinking what "intuition" really is, how it develops and happens in the brain, and what would be needed to build AI that has intuition.
That is very true. Transmittable knowledge doesn't capture the wirings that was required to produce the knowledge. I was watching the film on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan who had an immense intuition of mathematics, and really wondering how mathematical intuition, or intuition in general develops, and what intuition even means.
I am still not sure but after seeing Schmidhuber's talk last week, I think it is being able to find regularities/patterns, resulting in a compressed representation that allows to understand and compress some aspect of the world, and building layers (abstractions) of those compressed representations. This allows you to navigate through very large search spaces much much faster.
It's a fascinating subject, and at the core of what we are. I recommend the film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity_(film)
Its great to see Ramunujan getting a fair bit of attention these days. His story is really fascinating. I can recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/0671750615
This was also made into a movie a couple of months ago, I haven't seen the movie but it should be on netflix/itunes by now since I don't think it had a wide theatrical release.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0787524/
> A reassuring story for those of us who feel we are strong in many areas but fear we have deep, dangerous holes in certain fundamentals.
Then you will likely enjoy The Man Who Knew Infinity. Hardy and his peers were often shocked at the gaps Ramanujan had on basic fundamentals given his brilliant findings--based on this lack, his discoveries seemed like magic. Wolfram reviewed the movie here: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/
I was lucky enough to see The Man Who Knew Infinity this past weekend at the San Francisco International Film Festival. And I'd just like to say that it is a truly beautiful film, and I encourage everyone to go see it.
After the showing, there was a panel discussion with the director, composer, producer, two actors (Stephen Fry!), and three consulting mathematicians who helped the production. One of the topics that came up was the recent (finally!) interest in Hollywood for making movies about technical people. Since the dawn of cinema, we've made movies about artists, writers, and poets. But it is only recently that we've started making movies about scientists (Stephen Hawking) and mathematicians (Alan Turing).
In my opinion, this movie puts both The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game to shame. It is much more moving and beautiful than both, and it doesn't fall into the either the trap of overly simplifying the math, nor of overly dramatizing his life. If you have any interest in math, science, or computer science (much of which is underpinned by his work in number theory), I highly encourage you to go see this film.
That was a fascinating article.
There is a new biopic about Ramanujan. I wonder if anyone on HN knows when it will be released in the US. So far it seems it is only at film festivals.
http://tiff.net/festivals/festival15/galapresentations/the-man-who-knew-infinity