November 17, 2016 9:55 pm

Friday, Neil deGrasse Tyson Explores Ramanujan and the Beauty of Math

Remember the math genius Matt Damon played in Good Will Hunting?

Now imagine that he was a real, two-time college dropout living in Madras, India, at the turn of the last century, only even smarter.

A man who invented trigonometry for himself at the age of 12 or thirteen, only to eventually discover it already existed.

A man who once said to his wife that nobody has ever understood anything he’s ever written, who believed that the Hindu goddess Namagiri put math formulas on his tongue and he just wrote them down.

That’s but the slightest taste of how amazing the self-taught mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was.

He wrote three notebooks filled with mathematical formulas (and very few explanations of how he came up with them) that have kept the most brilliant minds in mathematics busy for over 100 years trying to figure them out. His formulas are used in the study of string theory and quantum gravity – two subjects that didn’t exist in his lifetime.

In essence, tomorrow’s episode of StarTalk Radio is all about Ramanujan and the movie about his life, The Man Who Knew Infinity. Neil interviews the movie’s director, Matt Brown, and actor Jeremy Irons, who plays Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy. Hardy was the only person who recognized Ramanujan’s exceptional genius and gave him a chance when other Cambridge professors rejected his work as a hoax. And our in-studio guest mathematician, Ken Ono, who was also a consultant on the film, has spent over 30 years studying Ramanujan’s work.

But tomorrow’s episode is also about the beauty of mathematics, which our host Neil deGrasse Tyson and others have called “the language of the universe.” And it’s about what it means to be a genius, and how rare and important to the rest of the world geniuses are. In fact, Ken is the co-founder of the Spirit of Ramanujan Global Initiative, currently searching the world for other undiscovered natural mathematical geniuses.

Mona Chalabi stops by to discuss how the US students compare to students around the world in math scores; Bill Nye waxes poetic about right angles, Manhattan’s Flat Iron Building and the Pythagorean Theorem; and co-host Eugene Mirman asks Neil and Ken fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio, and whether math is invented or discovered.

Join us for The Beauty of Mathematics, with Jeremy Irons this Friday, November 18 at 7pm EST right here on our website, or on iTunesPodcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher and TuneIn. And if you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can listen to this episode ad-free (no video for this one).

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons