Jason Furman's Reviews > My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count

I don't regret being baited and switched into reading this book. And I have only myself to blame for being baited and switched. I expected the book to be more about Ramanujan but instead it was mostly a memoir of a mathematician named Ken Ono. But the fulcrum of the book is Ramanujan. Ono was brought up by Japanese immigrant "tiger parents" who pressured him into being a mathematician. He rebelled to the point of dropping out of high school. But then he found a letter that Ramanujan's widow sent to his father thanking her for a donation to build a statue of him and that set his mind off--with a lag--so that he found himself constantly coming back to Ramanujan, both his life and his specific, unproved ideas. The book includes a 50 page mini-biography of Ramanujan and an appendix that attempts to explain some of his specific ideas. What makes the memoir so interesting is that it is not about a top mathematician but instead about someone struggling to join the profession and contribute and about the struggles, semi-failures, and semi-successes that go with it. My disappointment was that, other than the appendix, it attempts to cover very little of the substance of Ono or Ramanujan.

And if you are looking for a biography of Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity is one of the best scientific biographies ever written about an amazing and glorious and tragic life and mind.