The poor, almost entirely self-taught South Indian clerk who, with little formal training, produced mathematics of such strange depth that it still feels less discovered than received — who sent his theorems to Cambridge, worked with G.H. Hardy, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and died at 32, the great modern emblem of raw, untaught mathematical genius.
A young clerk in South India, with almost no formal training in advanced mathematics, filled notebooks with thousands of formulas no one had taught him. In 1913 he mailed some to a famous Cambridge professor. The professor saw at once that no mere amateur could have invented them. So he brought the clerk across the world. Within five years Srinivasa Ramanujan was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Within seven he was dead, at 32. He said a goddess showed him the formulas in his sleep.