Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms!I always liked this story when I heard it in Good Will Hunting because;
1) The language of mathematics broke culteral and class barriers in the early 1900's between a poor Indian student, and a learned Cambridge mathematician, and
2) True talent comes not from training, but from our truest desires.
Srinivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujan was an Indian mathematician and one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of the twentieth century. He is widely considered the greatest mathematical prodigy that the world has ever seen.
A child prodigy, he was largely self-taught in mathematics and had compiled over 3,000 theorems between 1914 and 1918 at the University of Cambridge. Often, his formulas were merely stated, without proof, and were only later proven to be true. His results were highly original and unconventional, and have inspired a large amount of research and many mathematical papers; however, some of his discoveries have been slow to enter the mathematical mainstream.
In 1898, at age 10, he entered the Town High School in Kumbakonam, where he may have encountered formal mathematics for the first time. At 11 he had mastered the mathematical knowledge of two lodgers at his home, both students at the Government College, and was lent books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney, which he mastered by age 13. His peers at the time commented later, "We, including teachers, rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe" of him.At this time in his life, he was quite poor and was often near the point of starvation.
In late 1912 and early 1913 Ramanujan sent letters and examples of his theorems to three Cambridge academics: H. F. Baker, E. W. Hobson, and G. H. Hardy. Only Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College to whom Ramanujan wrote in January 1913, recognized the genius demonstrated by the theorems.
Although Hardy was one of the pre-eminent mathematicians of his day and an expert in several of the fields Ramanujan was writing about, he commented, "many of them defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before."
After some initial skepticism, Hardy replied with comments, requesting proofs for some of the discoveries, and began to make plans to bring Ramanujan to England.
Plagued by health problems all of his life, living in a country far from home, and obsessively involved with his studies, Ramanujan's health worsened in England, perhaps exacerbated by stress, and by the scarcity of vegetarian food during the First World War.
He returned to India in 1919 and died soon after in Kumbakonam, his final gift to the world being the discovery of 'mock theta functions'.
G. H. Hardy wrote of Ramanujan:
* "I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, 'Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.'"
* "I remember once going to see Ramanujan when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. 'No,' he replied, 'it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.'"
* "...[T]he greatest mathematicians made their most significant discoveries when they were very young. Galois who died at 20, Abel at 26, and Riemann at 39, had actually made their mark in history. So the real tragedy of Ramanujan was not his early death at the age of 32, but that in his most formative years, he did not receive proper training, and so a significant part of his work was rediscovery..."
