His brilliance was so singular that he twice lost university scholarships because he neglected all subjects except math. Living on the brink of starvation, he spent his nights filling notebooks with equations that wouldn't be fully understood for nearly a century. The Unlikely Partnership

His life—immortalized in Robert Kanigel's biography The Man Who Knew Infinity and the 2015 film starring Dev Patel—is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of science. It is a tale of a self-taught clerk from Madras who, with no formal training, transformed the landscape of modern mathematics. From Obscurity to the "Lost Notebooks"

Ramanujan’s life was tragically short; he died in 1920 at just 32 years old. Yet, his "Lost Notebook," rediscovered in 1976, continues to inspire today. His "mock theta functions" are now used by physicists to understand the behavior of and superstring theory —concepts Ramanujan could never have known existed.

What does it mean to "know" infinity? For most of us, mathematics is a set of rules learned in a classroom. But for , it was a language of the divine, a series of truths that appeared to him in dreams and visions.

: Identifying a special class of numbers with more divisors than any smaller number.

Born in 1887 in Erode, India, Ramanujan grew up in modest circumstances. His obsession with numbers was sparked at age 15 by a book containing 5,000 theorems but almost no proofs. This lack of guidance became his greatest strength; unburdened by traditional academic rigor, he developed his own unique notation and methods.

: Calculating the number of ways a whole number can be split into smaller parts.