The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

From his earliest days, Ramanujan’s life was a confrontation with adversity. When he was very young, he developed smallpox, a dangerous and oftentimes fatal virus that killed thousands of Indians each time there was an outbreak. In fact, Ramanujan was something of a success story by the time he was a toddler, since “three or four in every ten children died before they’d lived a year” (12). The devastation caused by disease struck his own family, though he survived. By the time he was six years old, Ramanujan had lost three siblings to disease (12). Right from his earliest days, his life was an embodiment of overcoming adversity.

Kanigel devotes an entire section of Chapter 2 to the influence George Carr’s book A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics had on Ramanujan. While the book had a very positive impact on Ramanujan’s development as a mathematician, this development came at the expense of broader intellectual growth. The deeper Ramanujan went into his obsession with math, the more “he lost interest in everything else” (46). This led to one of the first significant failures in his life: he lost his scholarship at Government College and had to drop out.