श्रीनिवास रामानुजन

A clerk who failed college twice mailed 9 pages of maths to Cambridge.

A leading Cambridge mathematician decided the strangest formulas had to be true: no one could have made them up.

So Cambridge sent for Srinivasa Ramanujan. He had 7 years to live.

His real teacher was a book. At 15, he found one full of formulas that rarely showed why they worked.

Too poor to waste paper, he worked on a slate, and filled notebooks with answers.

He ignored every other subject, and failed college twice.

Now a clerk, he wrote to a Cambridge stranger, G. H. Hardy: "I am striking out a new path for myself."

Hardy wanted him in England. He refused: his strict Hindu community forbade crossing the sea.

His mother then dreamed, as his friends told it, that their goddess told her not to stand in his way.

At 26, he sailed. Hardy taught him to prove his answers, and said Ramanujan taught him far more.

Some of his answers were wrong. Most were right, and astonishing.

Far from home, in wartime England, he fell gravely ill.

At 30, the clerk from Madras was elected to Isaac Newton's old academy, the Royal Society.

Hardy recalled calling his taxi's number dull: 1729. From his sickbed, Ramanujan said no: it's the smallest sum of two cubes, two different ways.

That number was already in his notebook from India.

Very ill, he went home to India, and sent Hardy one last letter of strange new formulas.

He worked until about 4 days before he died, at 32.

92 years later, formulas like those in his last letter turned up in the mathematics of black holes.

Mathematicians needed 10 volumes, and nearly a century, to check everything in his notebooks.