Srinivasa Ramanujan

Robert Kanigel's The Man Who Knew Infinity follows Ramanujan from India into his collaboration with G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. It makes mathematical work part of a human story involving education, belief, illness and cultural distance. There is mathematics to encounter, but the main reason to begin here is the meeting of two very different intellectual lives. Neither the solitary-genius image nor the helpful-mentor image tells the whole story.