Tuesday, March 25, 2008

I finished a book!

A whole book! Today! A grown-up book! And I'd only been reading it for a few months!

The reason I bring this up is that while I used to read a book in a time span measured in hours or days, months is now the norm. Somehow children, slowly failing eyesight (why, I may finally have to have prescription lenses one day!) and more and more demands on my time (oh, and I guess laptop with fast wireless internet access) have combined to make reading more difficult for me. I have tried to curtail my expenditure on books, to the extent that I now buy 30-40 times as many books as I read, whereas I used to only buy 3-4 times as many....

This book was "The Indian Clerk", a novelization of the interactions of the Indian mathematician (and genius) Ramanujan, and his mentor and friend, Hardy. A fascinating read, albeit filled with more discussions of Hardy's homosexuality than might be deemed necessary --- be warned if this will offend you: otherwise, it is in some ways an important part of the book: it is who Hardy was, after all --- and occasionally getting an American viewpoint on Cambridge which somehow misses the point of an English or Cambridge quirk: all in all, it seems to have most of the story well and accurately told: the details I know well are all in accordance with the other biographies etc: the mathematics is not *too* badly done (although the continued reference to divergent sequences, followed by the series
1/1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8...
as opposed to the harmonic series I am sure that he meant, rankle a bit)

An interesting and enjoyable read: a good window onto academia in Cambridge during the first world war, and if you are not aware of Ramanujan, a pretty good introduction to his life.

Yours, as read,
N.

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