The Man Who Knew Infinity

Name: The Man Who Knew Infinity
Start: 2016-04-24T13:00:00-07:00
End: 2016-04-24T13:00:00-07:00
Location: Castro Theatre

Directed by Matthew Brown | UK | 114 min

Self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) seeks to burnish his talents at Cambridge’s Trinity College on the eve of the First World War in this entertaining fish-out-water biopic. Invited to study by don G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), the Madras, India, native faces prejudice and clashes with his new mentor over methodology, but remains committed to realizing his gifts. Writer/director Matthew Brown celebrates Ramanujan with a drama that encompasses the triumphs and the tragedies of his life.

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Description

A self-taught Indian prodigy from Madras arrives in Cambridge to revolutionize the field of mathematics in this biopic starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons (Peter J. Owens Award, SFIFF 2014), which follows such films as A Beautiful Mind and The Theory of Everything in its inspirational look at the struggles—and triumphs—of genius. The life of mathematics revolutionary Srinivasa Ramanujan (Patel, Slumdog Millionaire; The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is as eye-opening as his work: born into a poor family, he drops out of college to follow his obsession with math, and in 1914, writes of his theories to the Cambridge scholar G.H. Hardy (Irons), who takes a chance and brings the young man to the UK. Overcoming racism, class issues and the overwhelming cultural gap between Colonial India and its colonizer, England, Ramanujan sets about transforming the traditional world of mathematics, not to mention the even more formal world of Cambridge. A moving and star-studded tale of genius and culture, The Man Who Knew Infinity is most of all a tribute to the remarkable relationship between Ramanujan and Hardy, which grew from student/teacher to friends and peers.

Trailer

//player.vimeo.com/video/157228615?autoplay=1

Biographies

Director Matthew Brown

Matthew Brown made his directorial debut in 2000 with the romantic comedy Ropewalk and wrote the screenplay for the recent musical drama London Town, based on a young boy’s discovery of the band The Clash. “This is not your typical Hollywood film,” Brown says of The Man Who Knew Infinity. “A lot of movies that deal with scientific subjects just mention the science and go straight to the human story. We wanted to honor the math in this film, so that mathematicians could appreciate it as well as other audience members. One way we tried to do that was to show the passion the characters have for the subject.”