One of the most creative mathematicians of all time was Srinivasa Ramanujam, who was born in Tamil Nadu, India, on December 22,1887. He died at a regrettably young age, on April 26, 1920. By that time, however, he had come up with a remarkable number of mathematical discoveries. This creative genius often neglected to provide long, logical proofs for what he did. Often, he said, the solutions to problems came to him in his dreams, revealed as part of a sacred vision. Early life
Born to a family of modest means, Ramanujam struggled in his early life and the establishment of his career. Unable to access the latest information on the mathematical advances of his time, he spent some of his time independently rediscovering mathematical ideas and concepts that were already well known.
In 1914, convinced of his mathematical genius, Hardy, a mathematician at Cambridge University in England, helped to arrange for Ramanujam to come there to study and conduct research. Littlewood, a professor who was given the task of filling in the gaps in Ramanujam's knowledge, said that every time Ramanujam was exposed to something new, he came up with "an avalanche of original ideas" on the subject.
In his short life, Ramanujam produced a prodigious amount of work. He left behind three notebooks containing several thousand original formulae. Much of what he knew through his intuition and creative genius are only now being proven with the aid of computers. The French writer Nonn, says: "At Ramanujam's level, mathematics acquires an artistic quality. It is beautiful. It is almost poetry."
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