Q. A recent movie titled The Man Who Knew Infinity is based on the biography of (UPSC Prelims 2016)
Answer: S. Ramanujan
Notes: The correct answer is [A] S. Ramanujan. The 2015 film The Man Who Knew Infinity is a biographical drama based on the 1991 book of the same name by Robert Kanigel.

• Srinivasa Ramanujan (Statement A – Correct): The movie stars Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as his mentor, G.H. Hardy. It depicts Ramanujan's journey from a clerk in Madras (now Chennai) to the University of Cambridge, where he became a pioneer in mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.
• The Trinity Connection: Much of the film focuses on his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, during World War I and his struggle to provide formal proofs for his intuitive mathematical "visions," which he famously attributed to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar.
• S. Chandrasekhar (Statement B – Incorrect): Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist (and Ramanujan's nephew) known for the Chandrasekhar Limit, which determines the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star.
• S. N. Bose (Statement C – Incorrect): Satyendra Nath Bose was a physicist specialized in quantum mechanics. He is best known for his collaboration with Albert Einstein on Bose-Einstein statistics and the "Boson" particle named in his honor.
• C. V. Raman (Statement D – Incorrect): Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for the discovery of the Raman Effect, which deals with the scattering of light.

The Hardy-Ramanujan Number: A famous anecdote captured in both the book and the movie involves the number 1729. When Hardy visited Ramanujan in the hospital, he remarked that his taxi number was "rather a dull one." Ramanujan immediately replied that it was actually a very interesting number: it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways:1729 = 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³