11/01/2021
The Man Who Know Infinity.
Resurrecting RamanujanAmit Chaudhuri’s new book combines biography, poetry and history in a genre-bending experiment.
American mathematician George Andrews discovered Srinivasa Ramanujan’s “lost notebook” among the papers of G.N. Watson at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1976. It contained hundreds of unnumbered pages, with more than 600 mathematical formulas. No proofs were provided.
Since then, these notebooks have been published in several volumes, revealing to the world yet again the particular genius of the Indian mathematician who died in 1920, when he was only 32 years old. Now, Amit Chaudhuri’s new book, Ramanujan (Swindon, UK: Shearsman Books, 2021) resurrects the mathematician through poetry. The book, though still unavailable in India, pushes the envelope of what we think of as Indian poetry, or even poetry.
The poems about the different places are like the postcard-shaped polaroid photographs that one sticks on one’s fridge with magnets (or at least did before all photography became digital). Two of the most striking poems in the book are titled ‘Cambridge’ and ‘Oxford’. In the former, the narrator, possibly a friend or colleague of Ramanujan, says:
Source: https://m.thewire.in/article/books/verse-affairs-resurrecting-ramanujan/amp =16357903076964&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s