The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Matthew Brown
    Dev Patel, Jeremey Irons, Devika Bhise,
    Toby Jones, Jeremy Northam, Stephen Fry
Like a lot of people, I suspect, I managed to hack my way through school despite the fact that I had no discernible skill or interest in mathematics. This movie is about people who aren't like that. It takes place during World War One, and it's based on the true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel), who goes from the streets of Madras, India, to Trinity College, Cambridge, because of his brilliance with numbers. His mentor at Trinity is G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), and their collaboration turns into a long-running debate between a young man from another culture who approaches math intuitively and sees God in the relationships between numbers, and an older man, an atheist who believes that nothing has value without proof. It's a compelling human drama about people who find beauty and even transcendence in formulas and variables and all that other stuff the rest of us barely learned once, and forgot the moment the ink was dry on our final exams. It imagines math the way Ramanujan does, as an art form, an obsessive creative quest comparable to a Beethoven symphony. You don't have to understand how the numbers work to appreciate the movie.