IFC Films
I like to tell people I wasn’t a math major, but that said, I was an engineering major so I took a lot of math classes. But I really only covered the undergraduate stuff, meaning that the sort of math in the film was a few years ahead of me. I do have an appreciation for and kind of fun with math, which is more than a lot of people.
But I don’t really see it portrayed well very often in pop culture; the last I can recall was The Imitation Game, which I didn’t think was so great, and A Beautiful Mind, which I think is overrated. Aronofsky’s Pi was impressive, but that’s more weird meta-math than anything legitimate. So I’m willing to try something new, see what happens. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The Man Who Knew Infinity comes from writer-director Matthew Brown, based on the 1991 book of the same name by Robert Kanigel. This is a film based on a true story about a famous mathematician in the early 20th century. Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) is a lowly worker in Madras, India, but he has a spark of genius in the realm of math. He pushes himself and others to get himself across the world into the famous Trinity College at Cambridge. At this point, India was still a British colony, so that is a shadow over everything.
His capability catches the attention of gruff and confidently atheist G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), a famous mathematician himself. Soon Hardy becomes a kind of mentor, despite their disagreements about religion. What’s intriguing is that Ramanujan has a perspective on math that it’s a pure way of finding God in the physical world, a perspective of faith connected to rationality that’s rare in the community.
The central conflict is that Ramanujan has an intuitive sense of the theorems, but doesn’t have the clearly delineated proofs that would make it palatable to others, especially Hardy. Set against that is the brewing World War in the background, the constant racism, and Janaki (Devika Bhise), Srinivasa’s wife left back in India. These were interesting enough, although sometimes I felt like the film was repeating itself.
I think the way math is explained here is surprisingly effective and engaging, perhaps even enough to make sense to neophytes. The acting is also great, with Dev Patel doing something interesting for once, and Jeremy Irons getting a non-comic book movie to do some understated classic acting. No overacting here.
The film itself is paced relatively well, and I found that by the end I was invested in the story of someone that had actually lived. I spent a bit of time on Wikipedia afterwards reading about the life of this mathematician I had never heard of before this movie.
Infinity is an odd concept, hard to wrap your head around. But the future is infinite, because it’s always going to be there, and while we have movies, there will always be more. I think there’s a way to marry faith and science that is avoided by many stringent radicals, so it’s nice to be reminded that it’s possible to find truth in different ways.
Overall, this is one of those “indie” type movies that is usually loaded near awards season. I don’t think this will get as much attention, but whether it’s racism or lack of “zazz” (Ramanujan isn’t a well known figure outside the math field), it’s unlikely people will remember this one.
Which is a shame — it’s a lot better than that Russell Crowe movie about math.
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