FRIEND OF NUMBERS

A searching portrait of a clerk’s son whose fascination with numbers and number patterns led to renown.

Narayanan rises to the challenge of explaining this mathematician’s work in a nontechnical way by spinning her anecdotal picture of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s sadly abbreviated life around his more easily understood sense of wonder: “Like an artist exploring forms and colors or a poet exploring words and images, Ramanujan threw himself into exploring numbers.” That focus originated, she suggests, from an early consciousness of the patterns in his daily routines, like the repetitive Vedic chants and architectural structures of the nearby Sarangapani temple. A book of math problems left him “obsessed” with how numbers kept falling together into “patterns only he could see.” That phrase serves as a refrain for what came after as he struggled with both physical and cultural obstacles to leave India for faraway Cambridge University, where, fortunately, it didn’t take him long to make his mark before he died due to illness (tuberculosis, though this isn’t mentioned in the text) in 1920, at the age of 32. Gade artfully captures his subject’s keen, unselfconscious intelligence in lively views of a lad in a dhoti and, later (reluctantly donned), trousers staring intently at fanciful geometric figures and rows of numbers in strings, swirls, or tables to winkle out their secrets. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Inspirational reading even for audiences resolute in their math avoidance.