Beautifully written and illustrated. I had never heard of Ramanujan and this book sparked my curiosity to learn more about him. My 6yo wants to learn about more geniuses now, so we'll read a book about Einstein next. ( )

This is a story for kids about the childhood of Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan, considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Tamil, a state in southern India. By the time he was 11, he was known as a child prodigy in mathematics. School bored him, teachers got mad and him, and he was too shy to have friends. Math was his obsession and he was unable to focus on anything else. Later on, he flunked out of college, and had trouble getting a job. He wrote letters with his ideas about infinity to mathematicians at Cambridge University, and finally got an invitation to come there. In 1914, he left his family and boarded a steamer for England. The author ends there:

“As he rocked on the steamer and gazed up at the great night sky, so full of stars that it looked like a glittering infinity, he never could have guessed that someday scientists would use his ideas to help explore that sky and that his work would change the course of mathematics forever. One hundred years later, people would still search his notebooks in wonderment, trying to discover what he was thinking.”

In an Author’s Note, Alznauer reveals that her father is a mathematician, who had been inspired by the discovery of Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook, forgotten for decades in a box of papers that had found its way into Cambridge University’s Wren Library. She writes “This discovery has been likened to someone unearthing the tenth symphony of Beethoven. And the romance of this story is one of the reasons I studied mathematics in graduate school and still teach it today.” (Ramanujan’s "lost notebook", containing discoveries from the last year of his life, caused great excitement among mathematicians when it was rediscovered in 1976.)

She also notes that Ramanujan, who had been sickly in his life, died at only 32 years old. Nevertheless, his ideas “helped shape areas of science not even discovered in his lifetime: computers, black holes, and string theory.”

The author chose to focus not on Ramanujan’s mathematical ideas, but rather on the aspect of his story of being a young boy struggling to be understood and to follow his own star. This will be a feature of his life with which many young children will be able to relate.

Back matter includes a bibliography.

Illustrations by Daniel Miyares give numbers a prime place (so to speak) in the art work ( )

The amazing story of the brilliant Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was born in India in 1887, and died at the too young age of 32. He saw math everywhere, contemplating what small and big actually meant, wondering endlessly about the concept of infinity and the vastness of the sky, gods, etc. Bored in school, he was an original thinker, eventually finding his way to Cambridge, England. The water color illustrations were excellent, but I thought the book was strangely lacking in substance. 2.5 stars, rounded up.

I would like to read the adult biography of Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel to gain a broader understanding of his genius and contributions. ( )