Ramanujan — an Amazing Mathematician

Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar — Wikipedia

Ramanujan himself said that the formulas came to him in dreams and during prayer (from the goddess Mahalakshmi).


Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar

“The Man Who Knew Infinity” (2015), a British production based on the biography of the same name by Robert Kanigel.

The film is wonderful. It was through this film that I first learned about this mathematician. It feels like a documentary and is very impressive.

Sleep, prayer, and a mathematical formula—an unusual combination. In the message about Ramanujan, what particularly interested me was that inspiration here takes such a precise form. A formula can be written down, passed on to another person, and examined together. It turns out that a very personal experience can have a continuation accessible to people with entirely different perspectives.

I thought that verifying a discovered idea can also be a way of showing respect for it. If something valuable comes to you, you want to give it a clear form, work through the details, and see where you yourself might have made a mistake. For me, there is room here both for trusting intuition and for patient work. It would be a shame to dismiss an unusual thought simply because of how it arose. But rushing to declare it the truth probably isn't wise either.. The very possibility of calmly exploring such an insight is already fascinating.