Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of Indian mathematician and visionary mystic Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose extraordinary intuitive insights led to groundbreaking contributions to the field of mathematics. Despite working in isolation, extreme poverty, and with little formal training, Ramanujan independently discovered thousands of original results to longstanding mathematical problems, many of which were later proven correct and are still being explored today. Ramanujan viewed his mathematical insights as divinely inspired, believing that many of his formulas were revealed to him in visions by a Hindu deity. Ramanujan is celebrated as one of history’s greatest mathematical geniuses, whose work continues to influence modern mathematics, physics, and string theory.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887, in Erode, India, and soon afterward moved with his family to Kumbakonam, a major temple town in South India. Ramanujan’s father worked as a clerk in a sari shop, earning a modest income that kept the family in relative poverty. His mother was a devout woman who managed the household and sang devotional songs at a local temple, strongly shaping the family’s religious and cultural life. Together, they provided a traditional Brahmin upbringing, though with limited financial and educational resources.

Ramanujan was a quiet, introspective, and deeply sensitive child. He showed no obvious signs of genius in early childhood, but was known to be observant, contemplative, and somewhat withdrawn. As he grew slightly older, he became intensely curious and inwardly focused, traits that later blossomed into his extraordinary, solitary immersion in mathematics.

Ramanujan began formal schooling in 1893 at the age of five, attending primary school in Kumbakonam, where he quickly showed strong abilities in arithmetic. During these years, his family experienced financial instability, and he moved between different schools, but he consistently excelled academically, especially in mathematics. By 1899, he entered the Town High School in Kumbakonam, where his exceptional talent for numbers became increasingly apparent.

Ramanujan experienced an intellectual awakening during the early 1900s, when he encountered the book A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics by G. S. Carr at the age of 13, which sparked his obsessive, self-directed exploration of mathematics. During these years, he rapidly mastered advanced topics, began independently rediscovering and extending known results, and filled notebooks with original formulas. Although he excelled in mathematics, he neglected other subjects, leading to academic difficulties that prevented him from completing formal degrees — setting the pattern of brilliance paired with institutional struggle that would define his early life.

In the late 1900s and early 1910s, Ramanujan faced severe hardship, repeatedly failing college exams because he devoted himself almost exclusively to mathematics while neglecting other subjects. During this period, he lived in poverty, suffered from ill health, and relied on small stipends and the support of friends, yet he continued producing a vast body of original mathematical work recorded in his notebooks. In 1912, a turning point came when he secured a modest clerical job at the Madras Port Trust, which provided stability and led to introductions to mathematicians who would soon help bring his work to international attention.

Ramanujan experienced a dramatic transformation in 1914 after writing to English mathematician G. H. Hardy, whose recognition of his genius led to an invitation to Cambridge University. That year, Ramanujan traveled to England and began an intense collaboration with Hardy, producing groundbreaking work in number theory, infinite series, and modular forms, despite cultural isolation and declining health. By 1915, his mathematical brilliance was widely acknowledged in Europe, and he had established himself as one of the most original mathematicians of his time, even as the physical and emotional toll of his circumstances deepened.

Ramanujan reported having vivid visionary and mystical experiences in which mathematical formulas appeared to him in dreams or moments of reverie. He viewed his mathematical insights as divinely inspired, believing that many of his formulas were revealed to him in visions by the Hindu goddess Namagiri. He saw mathematics not merely as a logical discipline but as a sacred language expressing eternal truths, often arriving through intuition rather than step-by-step proof. This spiritual conviction infused his work with a sense of reverence and mystery, reinforcing his belief that his discoveries and most profound insights were gifts from a higher intelligence, rather than products of conscious invention or logical construction. These experiences deeply shaped his working style, leading him to rely on intuition and symbolic vision rather than formal proof, and they infused his mathematics with an almost oracular quality that continues to fascinate both mathematicians and philosophers of creativity.

Ramanujan reached the height of his formal recognition during the late 1910s, earning a Bachelor of Science by Research from Cambridge University in 1916 for his work on highly composite numbers. Despite worsening health during World War I, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918 — one of the highest honors in science — and also became a Fellow of Trinity College, marking unprecedented recognition for an Indian mathematician.

In 1919, Ramanujan became ill, possibly with tuberculosis. When Hardy visited him in the hospital, Hardy remarked that the taxi he arrived in, number 1729, seemed rather dull, to which Ramanujan immediately replied that it was in fact very interesting — the “smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (1³ + 12³ and 9³ + 10³).” The story beautifully captures Ramanujan’s astonishing numerical intuition and his ability to perceive deep mathematical structure in the most ordinary details of life.

That year, Ramanujan returned to India gravely ill, where he continued working and recording new ideas during the final year of his life. Despite severe and mysterious health problems, he continued to work intensely, producing remarkable new ideas, including the discovery of “mock theta functions,” which would prove profoundly important decades later. Ramanujan died in 1920, at the age of 32, leaving behind notebooks filled with visionary mathematics that continue to shape modern research.

Ramanujan left a legacy as one of the most original and intuitive mathematical geniuses in history, whose discoveries transformed number theory, infinite series, modular forms, and related fields. He is especially well known for the mysterious depth of his notebooks, and famous results such as the Ramanujan Tau Function and the Partition Formula” His notebooks and unpublished results continue to generate new research decades after his death, influencing modern mathematics, theoretical physics, and string theory. Ramanujan also stands as a powerful symbol of human creativity transcending poverty, limited formal education, and cultural barriers, inspiring generations of scientists and thinkers worldwide.

Physicist Michio Kaku said of Ramanujan that he “was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics.”

Here are some memorable quotes by Srinivasa Ramanujan.

An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.

While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.

I have not trodden through a conventional university course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as “startling.

by David Jay Brown