Ramanujan

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Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1816

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats tho’ unseen amongst us – visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower –
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening –
Like clouds in starlight widely spread –
Like memory of music fled –
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery

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Finished reading The Man Who Knew Infinity last night, the biography of the mathematical genius Ramanujan. The book was exhaustingly exhaustive yet somehow only revealed the shadow of this great and strange man. Perhaps a more in depth post further down the line to explain things; no clear direction for a review or intelligent comment is in my brain right now.

However, towards the end of the book author Kanigel does throw in a couplet from the above poem by Shelley, which I think mystically hints at the terrible greatness that was within this man, who died tragically at age 31 from tuberculosis, just coming into the height of his powers.

Yes, another post down the line will be coming, I think …