🇮🇳 India

In 1913, a clerk in Madras sent 120 theorems to Cambridge. He had no degree and had failed out of college twice for refusing to study anything but math. G.H. Hardy rated himself a 25 out of 100 for mathematical ability. He gave Ramanujan 100. Ramanujan said a goddess showed him formulas in dreams. He died at thirty-two. Mathematicians are still proving him right.

Jagadish Chandra Bose invented fundamental radio technology a year before Marconi — the waveguide, the horn antenna, the semiconductor detector — and refused to patent any of it. Knowledge, he said, belonged to everyone. Then he built the crescograph, which magnified plant movement ten million times. With it, he watched plants respond to light and touch, fall asleep under chloroform, and wake up again. Then he poisoned one. The crescograph recorded a violent electrical spasm, then a flat line. An audience watched a plant die the way they might watch an animal die: with a shudder, and then with nothing.