The Clerk Whose Genius Was Already Seen

In January 1913, Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy opened an envelope postmarked from Madras, India. Inside were nine pages of mathematical formulas scrawled by an unknown shipping clerk named Srinivasa Ramanujan — a man with no formal training, no university degree, no credentials worth mentioning. Hardy might have tossed the letter aside. Instead, he studied those pages late into the night and recognized something extraordinary.…