The Indian Clerk (2007)

Tug lib throw out. 60 cents

Perfectly evoking the ivory tower intellectual life of Trinity College, Cambridge and English society and attitudes in Edwardian times, Leavitt delivers a superb fictionalized biography of two men, focusing on the relationship between theoretical mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Ramanujan, the Indian self-taught genius.

Hardy’s war with God, social convention, Ramanujan’s quirks, his mother’s illness, and his sister’s unfulfilled potential leave the impression of a hard-working rationalist nearly lacking in all human understanding. By contrast, Ramanujan remains a mystical, insecure, frail, and estranged exotic transplant, yet working just as much as Hardy as they collaborate (with Littlewood) in an attempt to solve the Reimann Hypothesis, which remains to this day the "Holy Grail" of modern mathematics and one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. ( )

A very interesting book about the mathematician GH Hardy, at the time when the untaught Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan, entered his life. Thi story has been told in a number of places (I first came across it in the marvellous play by Complicite - a disappearing number) and speaks to many contemporary obsessions - colonialism, sexuality, the second world war, religion, maths and science, to name but a few. Leavitt draws a very compelling and convincing picture of the very strange world of Cambridge in the early years of the 1900s - a bizarre cultish place that produced a strange harvest of geniuses - and also produces sympathetic characterisations. Notable for me was Hardy's collaborator Littlewood, a very 'normal' man who happens to be an outstanding mathematician. Leavitt's first person narrative is impeccable, his narrator fallible yet likeable, and we are drawn into the world of this extraordinary story and given a glimpse of the alien but beguiling world of maths

- enticing book, obstensibly about Ramanujan, mostly deals with hardy, really it's about social manners and mores ( )