Vishal Monga

The book is a memoir of the famous English mathematician G.H. Hardy. I read the book when a graduate student and it made mathematics eternally romantic to me. Pursuing electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) for a Ph.D. at UT Austin, my research since has exclusively focused on applied mathematics. Hardy’s mentorship and prolific partnership with the genius Ramanujan (and it helped he was Indian) is the stuff of legend and has been beautifully captured in the book. I still go back to reading it to remind myself that beauty and elegance should be the guiding principles to any scientific or engineering solution. This is not a technical book that be directly used in research or education but remains a timeless reminder that the desire to passionately pursue anything whether material or abstract must necessarily come from the heart.