Srinivasa Ramanujan · Mathematics

The Self-Taught Genius and the Notebooks

How a poor clerk in South India, working almost alone from a single crammer’s handbook, filled notebook after notebook with thousands of deep results - stated by intuition, almost never proved - that mathematicians are still mining a century later.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Ramanujan was largely self-taught from Carr’s terse Synopsis , that his notebooks hold thousands of asserted results with few proofs, and that his ‘lost notebook’ was rediscovered in 1976. Explain, in your own words, what the notebooks contain and why proof-less genius is both a gift…

Leads to Pierre de Fermat.

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