Have you ever heard of Srinivasa Ramanujan?

Most people haven’t.
But his story is one of the most remarkable tales of raw genius the world has ever known.

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, a small village in southern India.
His family was poor, deeply religious, and part of a traditional Brahmin community.

He had almost no formal education in mathematics, he couldn’t even complete college because he failed in other subjects.
But from a young age, he filled entire notebooks with equations and theorems, formulas that had no explanation, no proof, just pure intuition.

He said that his formulas came to him in dreams.

By age 25, Ramanujan was unknown, unemployed, and living on the edge of starvation, yet he was writing formulas that no one in India could understand.

Desperate, he sent a letter, a 10-page letter filled with mathematical equations, to a professor at Cambridge University: G.H. Hardy.

Hardy was one of the most respected mathematicians in the world.
He almost threw the letter away, thinking it was nonsense.
But something in those strange, elegant equations caught his attention.

Hardy showed the letter to his colleague and said:
“This is either a genius or a fraud.”

It wasn’t a fraud.

Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to travel to England.
But it wasn’t easy.

Ramanujan had never left India.
He was a strict vegetarian.
He had to cross the ocean alone during World War I.
He was deeply religious and felt torn about leaving his homeland.

But he went.

He arrived in Cambridge, a thin, sickly man wearing Indian clothes and sandals in the cold English weather.
He was ridiculed. Misunderstood. Often isolated.
But his mathematical brilliance couldn’t be denied.

Together, Hardy and Ramanujan published groundbreaking papers that reshaped number theory, infinite series, and modular functions, work that still echoes in today’s computer science, cryptography, quantum physics, and string theory.

But the cold, the war, the poor diet, and the stress took a toll.

In 1919, after five years in England, Ramanujan returned to India, sick with tuberculosis and liver complications.

He died a year later.
At just 32 years old.

On his deathbed, he left behind pages of new formulas, some of which modern mathematicians are still trying to understand.

G.H. Hardy later said that working with Ramanujan was the greatest experience of his life.
He said, “The greatest mathematician of our time was a man who learned mathematics on the floor of a temple in India.”