ROBERT KANIGEL is the author of eight previous books, most recently Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEH 'Public Scholar' grant. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Kanigel, Professor Emeritus of Science Writing at MIT, lives in Baltimore with his wife, the poet S.B. Merrow.
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In 1913, a young, unschooled Indian clerk named Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, begging that pre-eminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Hardy, realizing the letter was the work of a genius, arr... SEE MORE