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The Man Who Knew Infinity
- A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
- Narrated by: Humphrey Bower
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's summary
In 1913, an unschooled young Indian clerk wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, begging that preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Hardy, realizing the letter was the work of a genius, arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most remarkable collaborations ever chronicled.
With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and teeming slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, "the Prince of Intuition", tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, "the Apostle of Proof". In time, Ramanujan's creative intensity took its toll: he died at the age of 32, but left behind a magical and inspired legacy that today is still being plumbed for its secrets.
Critic reviews
"Moving and astonishing." (Publishers Weekly)
"Extremely well-researched and well-written biography." (Library Journal)
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What listeners say about The Man Who Knew Infinity
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Overall
- Roger
- 05-23-08
Thorough and Enjoyable
This book explores (1) the influences of South India on Ramanujan's development, (2) the influences of the British educational system and society on GH Hardy and the other English scholars with whom Ramanujan met and worked and (3) the effects of those different influences on both Ramanujan and the English, personally and professionally.
Mathematical achievement is at the core of Ramanujan's story, and Kanigel does a good job of integrating it. A vague memory of high school math is required of the listener, and Kanigel uses that basis to explain both the directions and importance of Ramanujan's work, without trying to explain the specifics. The technical discussions are woven into the story, and do not at all get in its way.
While the book celebrates Ramanujan's improbable rise to success, overcoming tremendous obstacles, it also examines those obstacles, created by the British Raj and unfortunately persisting into the post-colonial Indian educational system.
While decrying the failings in Ramanujan's formal education, Kanigel also speculates on whether the broader South Indian culture, particularly the flexibility within Hindu religious traditions, allowed Ramanujan to approach mathematics less rigidly than could his English colleagues. No answers are attempted, but his questions are profound.
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28 people found this helpful
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- A
- 02-08-15
Great book, Awful narrator
The Good: This is a terrific book. Kanigel's biography of both Ramanujan and his friend and patron GH Hardy is filled with wonderful detail. He does an admirable job of conveying a sense of the complex mathematics Ramanujan worked on. He seems to do a pretty good job in conveying the complex life and death of this amazing mathematician.
The bad: The narration is awful. Humphrey Bower is Australian(!!!!!) This means he mispronounces all the Indian names and words *and* the British names as well. This was a staggeringly poor choice and it makes this great book difficult to listen to. An Indian reader would have been way better- or even a British one.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- M. thadani
- 05-03-11
well researched, excellent book, great narration
I don't write very many reviews but this book encouraged me to write one.
Its hard to write a book on Ramanujan without the mention of mathematics but the author does a wonderful job to not put off non mathematicians while listening. One can appreciate the profound activity without getting into the details.
The nice thing to appreciate, other than Ramanujan's work is also the leadership shown by Hardy. The English mathematician could recognize and appreciate the genius in the man without any pride especially after other senior mathematicians like Baker and Hobson failing to do so. I wish we have more of such leaders in today's world who can recognize talent and encourage it. Think about the thousands of Ramanujan's that exists in this world today but go un-noticed cause they have not found their Hardy or vice versa.
On the other hand its amazing to see that such a gifted man was driven to a point in his life so as to contemplate suicide. The man not only suffered from tuberculosis but also the usual mother-in-law daughter-in-law conflicts that has plagued the society for centuries now. May be the world just does not deserve to have the gifts of such a genius. Just unfortunate he did not live long enough.
The book is quite long for me but thoroughly enjoyable.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Barry
- 08-18-12
Finally! A biography for Srinivasa Ramanujan!
I've been waiting for this book for over 30 years. Every math major knows the famous anecdotes and the bare outline of his life, but to finally get to read about him in detail is so much more satisfying. Was he being used by the English establishment? Did moving to England cost him his life? These are questions that remain ambiguous. That he could have been more actively sponsored in his new home is unquestionable. That his choices contributed to the sort of benign neglect he suffered becomes a little more clear. This was clearly a guy who needed an active mentor, but who also pretty much got to do what he wanted. That critical balance between intervention and self-determination is at the core of this story. However, given that this is biography, that issue is left mostly to the reader to contemplate alone. The author's job is to show us what happened and leave us to draw our own conclusions. Listening to a book that includes math can be frustrating. The few math examples in the book can hardly be understood by having someone try to read out the complex equations. We are left with a kind of general idea of what those equations are supposed to convey. If his math is your primary interest, this is probably not the book for you, or at least the audio version is not for you. A biography of course should deal with a person's life, and here also despite Kanigel's best efforts the inner Ramanujan remains an elusive character. However, it's the best we have.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Joe Klein
- 07-02-14
A great man, no one knows but a great story!
What made the experience of listening to The Man Who Knew Infinity the most enjoyable?
This story is about a mathematician, a profession which very few understand, and fewer understand the impact on their own lives and livelihood.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Man Who Knew Infinity?
Ramanujan formulas for reality and infinity, and to stop the audio and think about it for a day, before replaying the chapter and understanding the depths of this mans mind.
Which character – as performed by Humphrey Bower – was your favorite?
The presentation was better then good, clear and understandable.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The last chapter, to understand how this man has changed the core of society throughout the earth, but not changed is own country.
Any additional comments?
There are moments, when mathematical formulas are read, which need to be repeated several times to understand. Very enjoyable book.
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5 people found this helpful
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- David Maruska
- 03-24-17
Great fill in from the Movie.
I've heard of S.Ramanujan some years back. This being the first narrative of him and life. The narrator is very pleasant to listen to. I drive two hours per day, this was two week book. I will keep it close in my rotation. UK man's voice. Not seeing parts of the math described was a disadvantage. Overall this book was very good.
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3 people found this helpful
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- wingdinger
- 06-03-16
Amazing story of an amazing man read amazingly
One of the best if not the best audiobook I've ever listened to. Very highly recommended to anyone, independent if you like maths or not.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ole Ole Ole
- 02-15-19
Great Book
My favorite mathematician, Srinivasa Ramaujan. The story goes in great detail about his life and work. If you watched the movie, them get prepared for the entire story. It's a Shame that the movie couldn't fit a lot of this stuff in, but, it's easily a book I will not forget. If you love mathematics, you will love this book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ramana
- 11-10-13
Shadow the Genius
What did you love best about The Man Who Knew Infinity?
The detail and narration makes you feel walking with the life of the Genius. The associated cultural context was well described.
What did you like best about this story?
Rags to Intellectual riches story and highlighting the intuitive genius overcoming the knife-edge slip into oblivion and fighting against odds with the help of available opportunities - ia amazing.
Which character – as performed by Humphrey Bower – was your favorite?
Ramanujan of course - especially reading of the letters was amazing.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
I planned to listen over couple of weeks (17+ hours), but ended up finishing in 8 days
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- Mahesh Kavaturu
- 02-12-12
Thorough and Captivating!
A thorough and captivating biography of Ramanujan! Very well written and read. A bit too long, as it covers the biography of GH Hardy as well. But, it is more than made up by the interesting writing style, detail and presentation. I loved it!!!
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Who was the 20th-century Indian sage known as Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi? How did he attain enlightenment and become one of the most celebrated spiritual masters of his time? Why is his spiritual teaching presently revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Taoists, and followers of other spiritual paths, transcending all religious differences? What is the essence of his revolutionary technique, popularly known as self-inquiry meditation? The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi offers you the answers to these profound questions.
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The readers voice makes it hard to listen too...
- By Amazon Customer on 01-21-22
By: A.J. Parr
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Alan Turing: The Enigma
- By: Andrew Hodges
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 30 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before his suicide at age forty-one. This classic biography of the founder of computer science, reissued on the centenary of his birth with a substantial new preface by the author, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life.
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A Fantastic Biography For The Patient Listener
- By Sara on 02-22-15
By: Andrew Hodges
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Ramana
- The Way of Knowledge
- By: David Christopher Lane
- Narrated by: Jason Zenobia
- Length: 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This small book contains two parts: 1) the words of Ramana on his spiritual methodology: "Who Am I?" And 2) an original essay by Dr. David Christopher Lane describing, in brief, the life and work of this most remarkable Indian sage, who is more influential today, decades after his death, than ever before.
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A Beautiful Mind
- By: Sylvia Nasar
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.
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Informative not entertaining
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 08-28-11
By: Sylvia Nasar
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Hearing Homer's Song
- The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry
- By: Robert Kanigel
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before", when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930s, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature.
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Milman Parry
- By Stephen on 05-05-21
By: Robert Kanigel
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The Art of More
- How Mathematics Created Civilization
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: Nick Afka Thomas
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks makes clear that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has been instrumental in every subsequent great leap of humankind: from charting the movements of celestial bodies to navigating the globe to tracking the dissemination of viruses.
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Wow!
- By Cinski446 on 07-12-22
By: Michael Brooks
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The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi: Self-Inquiry Meditation in Easy Steps
- The Secret of Now, Book 11
- By: A.J. Parr
- Narrated by: Fritz Angelo
- Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Who was the 20th-century Indian sage known as Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi? How did he attain enlightenment and become one of the most celebrated spiritual masters of his time? Why is his spiritual teaching presently revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Taoists, and followers of other spiritual paths, transcending all religious differences? What is the essence of his revolutionary technique, popularly known as self-inquiry meditation? The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi offers you the answers to these profound questions.
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The readers voice makes it hard to listen too...
- By Amazon Customer on 01-21-22
By: A.J. Parr
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Alan Turing: The Enigma
- By: Andrew Hodges
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 30 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before his suicide at age forty-one. This classic biography of the founder of computer science, reissued on the centenary of his birth with a substantial new preface by the author, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life.
-
-
A Fantastic Biography For The Patient Listener
- By Sara on 02-22-15
By: Andrew Hodges
-
Ramana
- The Way of Knowledge
- By: David Christopher Lane
- Narrated by: Jason Zenobia
- Length: 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This small book contains two parts: 1) the words of Ramana on his spiritual methodology: "Who Am I?" And 2) an original essay by Dr. David Christopher Lane describing, in brief, the life and work of this most remarkable Indian sage, who is more influential today, decades after his death, than ever before.
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The Universe Speaks in Numbers
- How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrated by: Hugh Kermode
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One of the great insights of science is that the universe has an underlying order. The supreme goal of physicists is to understand this order through laws that describe the behavior of the most basic particles and the forces between them. For centuries, we have searched for these laws by studying the results of experiments. Since the 1970s, however, experiments at the world's most powerful atom-smashers have offered few new clues. So some of the world's leading physicists have looked to a different source of insight: modern mathematics.
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Great story and narration, but lacks rigor...
- By James S. on 05-31-19
By: Graham Farmelo
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A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- By: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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I wanted more information about Information Theory
- By Bonny on 05-08-18
By: Rob Goodman, and others
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The Man from the Future
- The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
- By: Ananyo Bhattacharya
- Narrated by: Nicholas Camm
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.
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Good book, very odd narration
- By Ben Wiener on 04-10-22
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The Professor and the Madman
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.
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Perfect example of a quality audible book.
- By Jerry on 07-07-03
By: Simon Winchester
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A Brief History of Mathematics
- Complete Series
- By: Marcus du Sautoy
- Narrated by: Marcus du Sautoy
- Length: 2 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This 10-part history of mathematics reveals the personalities behind the calculations: the passions and rivalries of mathematicians struggling to get their ideas heard. Professor Marcus du Sautoy shows how these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world and proves that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science.
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not a book
- By botanist on 06-22-21
By: Marcus du Sautoy
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The Joy of x
- A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity
- By: Steven Strogatz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance