The Mathematician Who Dreamed in Equations

In January 1913, G.H. Hardy — one of the finest mathematicians in England — received a letter from an unknown clerk in Madras. It contained 120 theorems. Hardy assumed it was a prank. Then he sat down and actually read them.

Some of the formulas he recognized. Some he could prove with effort. Some, he later wrote, "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before." The clerk had no degree. He had failed out of college twice, both times because he refused to study anything other than mathematics. He had reinvented a century of European number theory alone, working in notebooks, while processing accounts at the Madras Port Trust.

Hardy brought Srinivasa Ramanujan to Cambridge. He later devised a personal scale for rating mathematical talent, with 100 as the ceiling. He gave himself 25. He gave Ramanujan 100.

Ramanujan produced nearly 3,900 original results during his short life, many without formal proof. When colleagues asked how he arrived at formulas that seemed to come from nowhere, he had a consistent answer. The goddess Namagiri appeared to him in dreams, he said, and wrote equations on his tongue. He would wake and transcribe them.

He died at thirty-two. He left behind three notebooks. A fourth, lost for decades, was found in a box at Trinity College in 1976. Mathematicians are still proving him right.