RI.9-10.7: One Subject in Different Mediums

Account A, a print biography: In 1913, a clerk in the port office at Madras, India, mailed a letter to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy. It held page after page of formulas, some already known, some wrong, and some unlike anything Hardy had seen. Srinivasa Ramanujan had almost no formal training and had left college without a degree after failing his other subjects.Account A: Hardy later wrote that the formulas had to be true, since no one could have had the imagination to invent them. He brought Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914, and together they published work that mathematicians still cite. In 1918 Ramanujan was elected to the Royal Society. He died in India in 1920, at 32.Account B, a ten-minute documentary segment: The camera moves slowly across a page of Ramanujan’s notebook as soft sitar music plays. Over shots of a crowded street in Madras, an actor’s voice reads lines from his letter. The scene cuts to a gray Cambridge winter, rain on stone walls, as a narrator says he was often cold, hungry and alone.Account B: A modern mathematician, filmed at a chalkboard, explains one of his formulas in plain words. The segment ends on a slow shot of a hospital window as the narrator says he died at 32, his notebooks full of ideas that others would spend the next century proving.