Srinivasa Ramanujan had almost no formal training, yet he produced thousands of identities so strange that G.H. Hardy couldn't decide whether he was a crank or the greatest mathematician alive. He credited his family goddess Namagiri with revealing them in dreams. He died young — and mathematicians are still proving things he simply knew.
Start with the life: a self-taught shipping-office clerk in colonial Madras who taught himself mathematics from a single borrowed book of theorems, then wrote to Cambridge with results no one had ever seen.
The trailer for the 2015 film with Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons — the arc of the story in two minutes: a poor genius summoned to wartime Cambridge, and the skeptical don who tried to make him prove it all.
Hardy visited the dying Ramanujan and grumbled that his taxi's number, 1729, was boring. Ramanujan shot back instantly — it's the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. The 'taxicab number' was born.
Mathologer unpacks the most notorious identity in Ramanujan's first letter to Hardy — the one that made Hardy suspect a hoax, and that turns out to be lurking inside real physics.
A puzzle he posed to a maths journal and answered himself: a square root inside a square root inside a square root, forever — collapsing neatly to 3. A window into how his mind actually worked.
In 1920, weeks from death, Ramanujan described mysterious functions that mimicked others but weren't them. For 90 years no one understood why. In 2012 a team proved he was right — and the functions help compute the entropy of black holes.
Mathematician Bruce Berndt traces the fate of Ramanujan's notebooks — including the 'Lost Notebook' rediscovered in a Cambridge box in 1976 — and asks the haunting question: how many of his discoveries simply vanished with him?