Hey! This is exactly what I think!

(Originally posted on Wednesday, 29 May 2019)

Once again I was reading about a great Indian chess player named Malik Mir Sultan Khan (who was actually a servant of a maharajah) and on a chess forum somebody compared him (Mir Sultan Khan) to Srinivasa Ramanujan. On the Wikipedia I found many interesting things about Ramanujan and his “lost notebook”.

Srinivasa Ramanujan „(22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered to be unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognizing the extraordinary work sent to him as samples, Hardy arranged travel for Ramanujan to Cambridge. In his notes, Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that Hardy stated had "defeated [him and his colleagues] completely", in addition to rediscovering recently proven but highly advanced results.”

“Ramanujan's lost notebook is the manuscript in which the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan recorded the mathematical discoveries of the last year (1919–1920) of his life. Its whereabouts were unknown to all but a few mathematicians until it was rediscovered by George Andrews in 1976, in a box of effects of G. N. Watson stored at the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The "notebook" is not a book, but consists of loose and unordered sheets of paper – "more than one hundred pages written on 138 sides in Ramanujan's distinctive handwriting. The sheets contained over six hundred mathematical formulas listed consecutively without proofs.”

“Ramanujan has been described as a person of a somewhat shy and quiet disposition, a dignified man with pleasant manners. He lived a simple life at Cambridge. Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Afterward he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.”

“Hardy cites Ramanujan as remarking that all religions seemed equally true to him.”

The last sentence quoted above struck me like a lightning, because this is exactly what I think! And it was said by a person who was an unquestionable mathematical genius who was deeply religious! Interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan%27s_lost_notebook