The Indian Clerk

[Daniel Harper]

I read this book...

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity/dp/0349104522/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197296457&sr=8-1

...back in high school, some ten or eleven years ago. It's a nonfiction
account of Hardy and Ramanujan, and I recall it as being quite good. I
haven't read the Indian Clerk, but it's on my Amazon Wish List.

On Dec 10, 2007 3:07 AM, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.amazon.com/Indian-Clerk-Novel-David-Leavitt/dp/1596910402
>
>
> From Publishers Weekly
> Ambitious, erudite and well-sourced, Leavitt's 12th work of fiction
> centers
> on the relationship between mathematicians G.H. Hardy (1877–1947) and
> Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920). In January of 1913, Cambridge-based Hardy
> receives a nine-page letter filled with prime number theorems from S.
> Ramanujan, a young accounts clerk in Madras. Intrigued, Hardy consults his
> colleague and collaborator, J.E. Littlewood; the two soon decide Ramanujan
> is a mathematical genius and that he should emigrate to Cambridge to work
> with them. Hardy recruits the young, eager don, Eric Neville, and his
> wife,
> Alice, to travel to India and expedite Ramanujan's arrival; Alice's
> changing
> affections, WWI and Ramanujan's enigmatic ailments add obstacles.
> Meanwhile,
> Hardy, a reclusive scholar and closeted homosexual, narrates a second
> story
> line cast as a series of 1936 Harvard lectures, some of them imagined.
> Ramanujan comes to renown as the the Hindu calculator discussions of
> mathematics and bits of Cambridge's often risqué academic culture
> (including
> D.H. Lawrence's 1915 visit) add authenticity. Hardy is hardly likable,
> however, and Leavitt (While England Sleeps, etc.) packs too much into the
> epic-length proceedings, at the expense of pace. (Sept.)
> Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
> All
> rights reserved.
>
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-- 
...the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are
words...
--Daniel Harper
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