Srinivasa Ramanujan's math magic to come alive in Hollywood

Forget Slumdog Millionaire, it's the story of the famed mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan that is poised to take Hollywood by a storm soon.

Robert Kanigel, biographer of Ramanujan, at a lecture in the city on Friday announced that the shooting for an international film based on Kanigel's biography on Ramanujan will begin in 2012.

“There have been many who have come to me and say that the book should become a movie but nothing happened. Six years ago, the option was bought and now it looks like it is finally going to happen,” said Kanigel, director of the graduate programme in science writing at MIT and the author of The man who knew infinity: A life of the Genius Ramanujan. He also mentioned that Edward Pressman will be producing the film and actor Madhavan will be playing the main character.

In the city, on the occasion of Ramanujan's 125th birth anniversary, Kanigel also spoke about the life of the mathematic genius.

“It is a feel-good story about a man in quest of freedom to do what he wanted to do and got that freedom. This is a tale of two mathematicians (Ramanujan and his mentor GH Hardy) finding each other,” he said, adding that Ramanujan's tale is also about overcoming adversity through persistence. He also spoke about his own journey of writing the book, first published in 1991.

“I come to Madras to do research for the book and get hustled into this autorickshaw and it turned out that I was sharing the rickshaw with the grandson of Narayan Iyer, the man who worked with Ramanujan at the Madras Port Trust Office. So, I had a lot of good luck,” he laughed.

Kanigel feels that it is the cinematic sweep of the book itself that lent itself easily to a film adaptation.

“There is a new form of non-fiction which does not just state one fact after the next. The emphasis is on telling stories and making the person interesting,” he said. He also stated his wish for getting his book translated in Tamil.