Robert Kanigel’s acclaimed biography of the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan is being published in Malayalam for the first time. The translation has been done by P Ramachandra Menon, T M Sankaran and J W Crystal Florey under a joint project of the Srinivasa Ramanujan Institute of Basic Sciences (SRIBS) - a capacity building initiative of the Kerala State Council for Science Technology and Environment (KSCSTE) - and the State Institute of Languages, with the support of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society.
Kanigel’s book published in 1991 details the extraordinary life and work of Ramanujan, especially his seminal mathematical contributions and his life-changing association with English mathematician G H Hardy.
The translation of the book into all Indian languages was a nationwide initiative launched in 2012 by the Government of India as part of the National Mathematical Year celebrations to mark the 125th anniversary of Ramanujan’s birth. Ananthatthe Arinja Aal is the second translation of Kanigel’s book in an Indian language, after the first in Tamil.
Chief Minister Oommen Chandy will release Ananthatthe Arinja Aal, the Malayalam version of Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, at the Kerala Science and Technology Museum on August 21. During the releasing ceremony, a documentary, Letters from an Indian Clerk by Christopher Sykes, will be screened. The documentary was produced in 1987 during the centenary of Ramanujan’s birth.
Minister for Culture K C Joseph, KSCSTE Executive Vice-President V N Rajasekharan Pillai, Kerala Institute of Languages Director M R Thampan and Head of the Department of Mathematics at CUSAT Ambat Vijayakumar will be present at the release function.