典型的な文系の自分は，理系に秘かな憧れを持っています。昔から岩波新書の物理学や数学についての本を読んではわかったような気になって喜んでいました。
そんな自分の好奇心を刺激する映画をアマゾン・プライムで見つけました。2015年公開のイギリス映画「奇蹟がくれた数式」です。実在したインド人の数学者，シュリニヴァーサ・ラマヌジャンのお話です。
I am a typically humanities-oriented person and I secretly admire someone who is science-oriented. I’ve always been delighted when I read Iwanami pocket edition book about physics or mathematics as if I could understand them.
On Amazon Prime video, I found a movie which stimulates my curiosity. The movie is called “The Man Who Knew Infinity” released in England in 2015. The story is about an Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan who really existed.
10/22公開 『奇蹟がくれた数式』予告編
２０世紀の初頭，インドのマドラスに住む青年ラマヌジャンは，数字に強いことが職場で認められ，会計の仕事を任されていました。仕事の合間にも，数学的なアイデアをメモにまとめていく彼の姿に，尋常でない能力を感じたイギリス人の雇用主をはじめ周囲の人々が後押しして，ラマヌジャンはケンブリッジ大学のハーディ教授のもとで研究をすることになったのでした。しかし，結婚したばかりの妻を残して，イギリスへとやってきたラマヌジャンを待っていたのは，厳しい現実でした。ヒンズー教徒であるがゆえの食事における制限，人種についての偏見，そして何より苦痛だったのは，直観をもとに次々に見出す定理や公式について，いちいち数学的証明を求められることでした。そんな彼をサポートしながら彼の論文を発表できるよう，ハーディは努力するのでしたが……。
At the beginning of the 20th century a young guy called Ramanujan who lived in the city of Madras in India was recognized as someone who is really good at figures at his workplace so he was assigned as an accountant. The English employer and others at the workplace found Ramanujan having extraordinary abilities through his memos which he wrote down mathematical ideas on in his spare time, so they backed him up to go to England and study under Professor G. H. Hardy at University of Cambridge. However, what waited him who came there leaving his new bride in India was harsh reality. He suffered from restricted diets because of being a Hindu, racial prejudice, and, this is the most painful thing for him, being required to prove his theorems and formulas, which he intuitively got, whenever he tried to report them. Hardy made great efforts to support him to publish his articles.
エンターテインメントとは程遠い，シリアスな内容でしたが，主人公に感情移入し，ときに涙しながら観ました。ラマヌジャンという数学者を自分は全く知りませんでした。ウィキペディアで見る限り，彼は高校での成績は全科目で悪く，奨学金で入った大学も数学に没頭するあまり他教科で落第して中途退学したようです。正式な教育を受けていないラマヌジャンは，せっかく得た定理に明確な証明を行わないまま亡くなってしまい，死後に数学者らによってその作業が行われ，それが終了したのはなんと１９９７年だったとのことです。彼の業績には，円周率の公式をはじめ，数学の発展に今でも寄与しているものが多いようです。この映画は，1991年に出版された同名の伝記小説をもとにしているとのこと。いつか読んでみたいです。
This movie was really serious far from entertaining, but I empathized with the main character so I cried sometimes while watching. I didn’t know the mathematician, Ramanujan, at all. As long as I can see from Wikipedia, his grades were not good enough in every subjects when he was a high school student, then he went to University on a scholarship but ended up dropping out because he was so absorbed only in mathematics that he failed in all the other subjects. Ramanujan who didn’t have proper education has finally died leaving many theorems unproved, so many mathematicians worked on them and they were finally done in 1997. His achievements are something that still contributes to the development of mathematics even now, including the formula for calculating the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. This movie is based on a biographical novel of the same name. I’d like to read it, too.
