A short life of the author
Robert Kanigel (born 1946) is an American biographer and non-fiction writer who specialises in making complex intellectual lives accessible to general readers. His biography of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan — The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (1991) — is widely regarded as one of the finest popular biographies of a scientist ever written: a book that makes higher mathematics emotionally comprehensible and that tells the story of one of the most extraordinary minds in human history with narrative skill, cultural sensitivity, and genuine intellectual seriousness. Kanigel’s other books, on subjects ranging from Frederick Winslow Taylor to the French Riviera to the nature of professional mentorship, share the same virtues: meticulous research, clear prose, and an abiding interest in how human beings do difficult things.
Life and Career
Kanigel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he trained as an engineer. He worked as a journalist and technical writer before turning to book-length non-fiction. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Baltimore, where he directed the science writing program. His background in engineering gives his writing about technical subjects — mathematics, industrial management, scientific method — an authority that most literary journalists lack.
The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991)
The book tells the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), a self-taught mathematical prodigy from Kumbakonam, in southern India, who produced results of staggering originality with almost no formal training. Working in isolation, Ramanujan filled notebooks with theorems and formulas that he could not prove in the Western sense but that turned out, in most cases, to be correct — and in many cases far ahead of contemporary mathematical research.
In 1913, Ramanujan wrote a letter to G.H. Hardy, the great English mathematician at Cambridge, enclosing some of his results. Hardy recognised genius immediately and arranged for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge, where the two formed one of the most remarkable partnerships in the history of mathematics. Ramanujan produced an extraordinary body of work during his five years in England, but the cold climate, the alien food, the loneliness, and his strict vegetarian Brahmin diet contributed to his declining health. He returned to India in 1919 and died in 1920, aged thirty-two.
Kanigel’s achievement is to make this story — which involves mathematics far beyond what most readers can follow — deeply moving and humanly comprehensible. He reconstructs Ramanujan’s childhood, his cultural context (Brahmin South India in the late colonial period), his mathematical discoveries, and his relationship with Hardy with equal care. The portrait of Hardy is itself a minor masterpiece: the fastidious, atheist, cricket-obsessed English don and the devoutly religious, intuitive Indian genius, working together in the intense atmosphere of wartime Cambridge.
The book was a New York Times Notable Book and was adapted into a film (2015) starring Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy.
Other Books
Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty (1986) — Kanigel’s first book — traces a chain of scientific mentorship through several generations of biomedical researchers, examining how scientific knowledge and method are transmitted from teacher to student. The book is a significant contribution to the understanding of how science is actually practiced — through personal relationships rather than abstract methodology.
The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (1997) is a biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, whose time-and-motion studies transformed American industry and whose vision of human labour as a problem to be optimised has shaped (and haunted) American work culture ever since. Kanigel’s biography is the definitive account of Taylor’s life and ideas — sympathetic enough to understand Taylor’s genuine contribution, critical enough to recognise the dehumanising implications of his vision.
High Season: How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand Years (2002) is a cultural history of the Côte d’Azur — a lighter book than Kanigel’s biographies but still richly researched and engagingly written.
Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (2016) is a biography of Jane Jacobs, the urbanist and activist whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) transformed thinking about urban planning.
Critical Standing
Kanigel is one of the best American non-fiction writers working in the tradition of popular intellectual biography. The Man Who Knew Infinity is his masterpiece, but his entire body of work is characterised by thoroughness, clarity, and a deep respect for his subjects’ intelligence. He belongs in the company of Richard Rhodes, David McCullough, and Deborah Blum as a practitioner of serious popular non-fiction.
Collecting Kanigel
The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991, Scribner’s) in first edition with dust jacket brings $40–$100. The One Best Way (1997, Viking) brings $20–$50. Apprentice to Genius (1986, Macmillan) is the scarcest title and brings $30–$80. Signed copies are uncommon but available. The film adaptation has increased collector interest in The Man Who Knew Infinity.