One of the greatest minds in mathematics was a man with little formal training in maths from Madras, India named Srinivasa Ramanujan. He has compared to Euler and Jacobi and sometimes even to Newton. He would write, possibly in chalk on a slate board or on the floor of one of the temples in his town and eventually put them into notebooks. Although it was difficult because his written work didn't demonstrate proof of his theories, he eventually got some support from mathematical experts in the area. Finally, with the help of his Indian boss, Narayana Iyer, and others, he was invited to Trinity College around 1914 by G.H. Hardy, where he learned how to prove his theories (not all of which were correct) and got several of his works published, including in Partitions - a problem then considered unsolvable. Despite jealous, bigoted resistance from certain people at Trinity, he and his mentor, Mr. Hardy, and J.E. Littlewood, were able to publish several of his theories with proofs.
Ramanujan, center, and G.H. Hardy, far right
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree by research (later renamed a PhD) in 1916 and then, in 1917, he was elected to the London Mathematical Society. In 1918, he became the second Indian (77 years after Ardaseer Cursetjee) to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, where he was also one of their youngest at 31, and later a fellow of Trinity College despite rigorous opposition. He endured a great deal of racism while there. He credited all his mathematical findings to his family's goddess, Namagiri Thayar, and famously said: "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
He returned to India in 1920, ill not with the Spanish flu but with what he'd been told was tuberculosis (but may have actually been the already treatable amoebic dysentery), where he continued to work on maths until he died about a year later. His wife, Janaki, remained a widow as is tradition in most of India, working as a tailor, and eventually got pensions for his work at Madras University, the Madras Port Authority, and others.
His brother collected his final works in a notebook, which was rediscovered in 1976. His work opened up entirely new areas of maths, and some of it has even been used to help study black holes.
If it weren't for the film "The Man Who Knew Infinity", with Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, I wouldn't even know about this man who Western history obscured for so long.
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