The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity

Summary of Book

In 1887 in India, a boy named Ramanujan is born with a passion for numbers. He sees numbers in the squares of light pricking his thatched roof and in the beasts dancing on the temple tower. He writes mathematics with his finger in the sand, across the pages of his notebooks, and with chalk on the temple floor. “What is small?” he wonders. “What is big?” Head in the clouds, Ramanujan struggles in school — but his mother knows that her son and his ideas have a purpose. As he grows up, Ramanujan reinvents much of modern mathematics, but where in the world could he find someone to understand what he has conceived?

Author Biography

Amy Alznauer is an author of poetry, essays, and nonfiction for children. Her adult memoir Love & Salt won a Christopher Award. She is also on the mathematics faculty at Northwestern University, where she teaches calculus and number theory. She lives in Chicago.

Illustrator Biography

Daniel Miyares is the author and illustrator of several books for young readers, including Night Out, Bring Me a Rock!,and Float. He is the illustrator of Little Fox in the Snow by Jonathan London. He lives in Lenexa, Kansas.