Question 14 from UPSC CSE 2016 - Current
Affairs

Question

A recent movie titled 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' is based on the biography of

IASCODEX · Accepted Answer

Correct Option: A. S. Ramanujan

Strategy: Recognize the movie title 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' and directly associate it with the mathematician S. Ramanujan to select the correct answer.

Key Info: The movie 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' (2015) is based on the 1991 biography of the same name by Robert Kanigel.

*   **S. Ramanujan (Srinivasa Ramanujan, 1887-1920):** A brilliant Indian mathematician who made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, despite having almost no formal training in pure mathematics. His work included the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the number of partitions of an integer and mock theta functions. His collaboration with British mathematician G.H. Hardy at Cambridge University is a significant part of his biography.
*   **S. Chandrasekhar (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, 1910-1995):** An Indian-American astrophysicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his theoretical studies of the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars, particularly the Chandrasekhar limit.
*   **S. N. Bose (Satyendra Nath Bose, 1894-1974):** An Indian mathematician and physicist known for his work on quantum mechanics, which led to the development of Bose-Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose-Einstein condensate. The class of particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics is named bosons after him.
*   **C. V. Raman (Sir C. V. Raman, 1888-1970):** An Indian physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his pioneering work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him – the Raman effect.

IASCODEX · Answer

Option B: S. Chandrasekhar

IASCODEX · Answer

Option C: S. N. Bose

IASCODEX · Answer

Option D: C. V. Raman