We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier.
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. And the trajectory of his tragic life, even if one is initially unfamiliar with it, is all too predictable long before he starts having “Camille”-style coughing fits.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Too much is made of Ramanujan’s puppyish love for the wife he left behind in India (as if the film needed a romantic angle to snare us). Patel, best known from “Slumdog Millionaire,” is a frisky, engaging performer, but he never convinces as someone for whom numbers were sacred. But this core is eclipsed by Brown’s gentlemanly, once-over-lightly approach. The film’s core is the deep friendship that developed between Hardy, the tweedy Oxbridge atheist, and his devoutly religious disciple, who believed that his equations expressed thoughts from God.
THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY MOVIE RELEASE DATE USA SERIES
Toiling in a series of accounting jobs, he worked feverishly on his theorems and managed to get them to Hardy, the famed University of Cambridge professor who alone among his colleagues recognized Ramanujan’s genius from the start and, in 1914, brought him to Trinity College. Ramanujan was born into a poor Brahmin family and showed an extraordinary aptitude for mathematics early on, making intuitive intellectual leaps for which he often only later supplied proofs. (A novel, an Indian biopic, and multiple plays about Ramanujan have previously appeared.) It’s a conventional movie about a most unconventional subject. Ramanujan’s life is such a gold mine of intellectual and cultural complexity that this well-intentioned but tepid movie, loosely adapted from the eponymous 1991 Robert Kanigel biography, is doubly disappointing.
I wonder what that scientist would have made of writer-director Matthew Brown’s “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” starring Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as his mentor, British mathematician G.H. The scientist asked me why no one had ever tried to make a movie about Ramanujan, who grew up poor in Madras, India, and died at age 32 in 1920 after having attended the University of Cambridge and revolutionized mathematical thought with theorems that still have resonance today.
Around the time that “Good Will Hunting” came out, I had occasion to chat with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist about the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who is referenced in that film.