The Man Who Knew Infinity

I read a book Srinivasa Ramanujan: A Mathematical Genius by Dr. K. Srinivasa Rao. It is a good book giving glimpses from the life story of India's great mathematician, who literally solved mathematical problems in his dreams. The book also covers some of Ramanujan's theorems in brief. Many of the theorems, especially those related to "highly composite numbers" and partitions, are mind boggling. A copy of one page from his famous notebooks is shown in this book, in which he works out a way to "square a circle", basically a geometrical method to find the side of a square having the same area as a circle (this can be never accurate, as pi is a transcendental number, and pi*r*r can never be a perfect square). The mathematician Littlewood said that every number was a personal friend of Ramanujan. Even while he was sick in bed, in 1919, he was hurriedly working with his notebooks. How did Ramanujan arrive at his theorems and results some of which were formally proved only decades later? Probably that is what makes us feel that his genius is something... of mystical proportions. It makes me think of Edmund Thomas Clint. He died at the age of 7, before which he made around 20,000 paintings and drawings most of which are of amazing quality for a small child.

Dr. Rao has mentioned about a book The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel, which is a biography of Ramanujan written in a much elaborate and readable way. I have got hold of this book as well, and am planning to read it next.