Re-enchanting Numbers
by Lila Stiff
A Review of The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity: A Tale of the Genius Ramanujan by Amy Alznauer, illustrated by Daniel Miyares
“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God,” he writes. Ramanujan’s adult life is presented as a breathless quest to find... the thoughts of God lying unspoken upon his tongue.
Art objects in themselves—pairing prose with visual artistry, distilling a truth to its simplest expression—the best picture books are truly for everyone. And many of the best picture books in recent years have been biographies, presenting the kernel of an idea inside the shell of the life in which that idea has taken root and grown.
One stirring new book of this ilk presents an all too rare approach to mathematics and contemplation. In The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity (Candlewick Press, April 2020), author Amy Alznauer celebrates the life of Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. On the surface, Ramanujan is not exactly picture book material: Bernoulli numbers, mock theta functions, quartics—the pure math substance of Ramanujan’s legacy does appear to have deterred other children’s book authors thus far. But in other aspects, he is a palm-to-forehead obvious fit for such a story: a prodigy on the periphery, in spite of discouragement, hunger, and no one who could understand, he rediscovered much of modern mathematics in isolation from the academy. Yet his notebooks continue to baffle and delight mathematicians and scholars a century later.
Blessedly, Ramanujan’s life has found its ideal interpreter in Amy Alznauer. Alznauer is a writer of poetry, essays, and three children’s books, but also teaches calculus and number theory at Northwestern University (I don’t know Alznauer, but it is possible for a person’s on-paper bio to serve as better proof that they must be even more fascinating than they sound?). She is also the daughter of the mathematician George Andrews, who in 1974 discovered Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook (his work in the final year of his life). As she writes in the book’s exquisite author’s note, her father’s discovery was akin “to someone unearthing the tenth symphony of Beethoven.” Her passion for this story is palpable.
Click on image to enlarge. Reprinted with permission from Candlewick Press.
Her narrative is both simple and beguiling, sophisticated in its themes, yet inclusive, compelling children and their adult co-readers to look at number in a new way. From the start, she presents a spiritual dimension to mathematics: “Before you were born … the goddess Namagiri whispered in your grandmother’s ear that someday she would write the thoughts of God on your tongue,” confides Ramanjuan’s mother to her tiny swaddled baby. A toddler, Ramanujan contemplates and investigates as only toddlers do. A young boy, he ponders the pieces into which one can chop a mango and yet still have one whole mango. A schoolboy, he flees from the strictures of calculation to inquire about number, deeply. As he grows, Ramanujan’s ponderings about big and small, part and whole, increase in sophistication but only ever grow more playful.
Alznauer’s prose shines as it lingers on the particularities of Ramanujan’s cultural milieu, her specifics anchor his transcendent investigations. She is generous with Tamil words, touches gently on Brahmin customs and Hindu belief, evokes the bustle of the subcontinent children’s games and busy ports alike. The pages are framed by illustrator Daniel Miyares’s distinctly Indian decorative borders. With a vibrant Madras palette, Miyares employs watercolor to be at turns tight, controlled, and then loose, unfurling in a wet-on-wet expansiveness superimposed with numeral. It is apt: “A Beautiful Mind”-cum-tropical-child’s-play. Alznauer skillfully presents the thrust of Ramanujan’s findings in such a way that a child (or even their math-ignorant adults) might appreciate the nature of his questions, if not perform the calculations they demand. Rare for a children’s book about math, it is not imperative that one reach a certain grade level to appreciate the content.
The book provides a glimpse into a more historical, classical, and spiritually transcendent view of mathematics. In most places, across much of history, mathematics has been looked to as the language of God. For Pythagorean Greeks, the quality of numbers revealed the nature of the eternal. For Classical Greeks, a grounding in the mathematical quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) was the necessary training that proceeded the pinnacle of philosophy. In Ancient India, Vedic priests passed down proofs in the sutras and incorporated number contemplation into corporate worship. Ancient Jews and medieval Christians alike pondered the theological symbolism of number. Closer to our own time, Christian mystic Simone Weil wrote extensively about sacred geometry and the Trinity. Beauty itself belies math at its core. And of course across the sciences, it is mathematical inquiry that has opened the cosmos to exploration.
Click on image to enlarge. Reprinted with permission from Candlewick Press.
“Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation,” notes classical educator Stratford Caldecott. In American popular experience, one set seems truly scarred by their math education, seizing on the shame of being “a math person” while another set shamelessly declares “I hate math!” as a scourge of sterile rigidity. Across that polarized binary of competence, the absoluteness of number is perceived as more rote and rebuking than transcendent. Could it be that this is because the math we learn is mere computation, and computation alone? Where in the typical American classroom is math equated with mystery, with playfulness, with eternity? The situation is as impoverished as art education would be if students were shown neither Van Eycks nor Vermeers, nor given a paintbrush to hold in their hands, but taught only to grind pigment from rocks and minerals, grinding ever on with no imagination cultivated as to that pigment’s applications.
As an adult, I’m attempting to redeem my own mathematical education, if not in skill, then in enthusiasm, as I try to impart a more generous approach to my own children. The history of mathematics has been special fodder for fascination; historical scaffolding upon which to hang my own ignorance. Sumerian cones, Egyptian pyramidal calculations, the earliest conceptions of zero, Plato’s call for the development of geometry in his Republic, the etymology of “algebra” from the Arabic word for “bone-setting” … it has been the story of math, its narrative thread stitched through peoples and cultures across time, that has opened in me a wonder at the ideas involved in pure math.
And what comes across clearly is Ramanujan’s story – true also for the mathematicians I know – is that math is playful, free, creative, contemplative. “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God,” he writes. Ramanujan’s adult life is presented as a breathless quest to find someone who can appreciate the nature of his findings, who can join him in this unattainable act of contemplation, the thoughts of God lying unspoken upon his tongue. At last, by mail, he finds an apt communicant in Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy, who beckons him to England. Hardy would later call their (tragically short) intellectual communion, “the one romantic incident in my life.” There is an echo here of the themes of Alznauer’s first book: an epistolary “spiritual friendship,” titled Love & Salt, in which the theme of spiritual companionship refracts throughout. Can we be initiated into this conversation, into the deep play of inquiry, the creative project of proof, the mind of the Creator? The possibility arises in the most unlikely of places, a picture book biography, suggesting we – and crucially, our children – can at least be open to venturing into this vast contemplative realm.
picture book
48pp., hardcover, $17.99
Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press
Published April 14, 2020
ISBN 978-0763690489
Lila Stiff is a sixth-generation Washingtonian. A home educator and mother of four, she moonlights as an indie bookseller in between babies, and reads widely.
