THIS is the third film, after “A Beautiful Mind” (2001) and “The Theory Of Everything” (2014), about a mathematician who made profoundly important discoveries while beset by profoundly debilitating personal conditions.

Writer/director Matt Brown’s bio-pic of Srinivasa Ramanujan delivers a portrait of a man who knew how far he could go if given effective guidance.

He taught himself from an out-of-date mathematical treatise he found in high school that set him on his life’s course. From age 17 he built such a reputation and achievement in mathematical skills that, by early 1913, he felt emboldened to write to GH Hardy at Trinity College enclosing some of his unproved theorems. Hardy was hooked. And this is where Brown’s film begins.

You don’t need to understand higher mathematics to take satisfaction from it. It’s about a fish out of water, an impoverished vegetarian Hindu genius who left a young wife in his mother’s care in Madras and came to Cambridge to learn from the Fellows of an institution with centuries of Anglo tradition and social prejudices.

It treads carefully among emotional anguish, frustration, shame, embarrassment, anxiety and, after graduating with the 1916 equivalent of a PhD and election as a Fellow of two prestigious learned Societies, learning of the previous misdiagnosis of the tuberculosis that ultimately caused his death in India aged 32.

Dev Patel as Ramanujan is gently convincing. But the film belongs to Jeremy Irons as Hardy, the austere academic who learned much about his own humanity from Ramanujan’s example as he helped to cultivate and fertilise the latter’s consuming passion. Toby Jones is good as Littlewood, Hardy’s close friend. And as Janaki, Ramanujan’s wife, denied the comfort of his letters as much by her own illiteracy as by his mother’s concealing of them that she didn’t discover until after his death, Devika Bhise provides a mote of poignancy and concern for the social condition of women in India.

At Dendy, Palace Electric, Greater Union, from May 5