Abstract
This chapter explores a slightly fictionalised phase in the history of mathematics in which two famous but highly diverse representatives of the discipline meet. One is the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) and the other is G.H. Hardy (1877–1947), distinguished professor at the University of Cambridge. Based on a critical analysis of Matthew Brown’s biographical film The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, the chapter discusses the film’s postcolonial stance which uses temporal connectivity as well as discursive aspects to support a universal reading. Schaffeld claims that the aim to reinvest the spatio-temporal frame of life in Cambridge during the First World War with today’s problems of racism and institutional exclusion reveals a distinctive feature of this maths film.
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Notes
- 1.
But Matthew Brown ventured to change locations for filmic purposes. For example, the scene of the meeting of the Royal Society (London), which named Ramanujan a Fellow in 1918, was shot at seventeenth-century Convocation House, Divinity School, Oxford (1:31:02–1:34:16).
- 2.
Littlewood points to a sapling as the one under which Newton sat when the famous apple dropped on his head, but the tree is supposed to be just a descendant of Newton’s legendary counterpart of his childhood home in Lincolnshire.
- 3.
The camera captures the inscription of the statue. “Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit” is a quotation from Lucretius’s De rerum natura. It can be translated as: “In intellect he surpassed, survived the human race.” It is interesting to notice that the film music of this scene blends Western and Indian elements to underscore the hybrid position that Ramanujan finds himself in (36:36–37:22).
- 4.
For the theoretical foundations of such a reading, see Schaffeld (2016, 170–2).
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Schaffeld, N. (2019). “It’s for Fellows Only!”: On the Postcolonial Stance of Matthew Brown’s Maths Film The Man Who Knew Infinity. In: Engelhardt, N., Hoydis, J. (eds) Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_9
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