Srinivasa Ramanujan Was a Genius. Math Is Still Catching Up.

The article presents Srinivasa Ramanujan as a self-taught mathematician whose ideas keep resurfacing across modern mathematics. It follows the path from his early work and letters to G.H. Hardy to later connections with partition identities, Rogers-Ramanujan identities, and recent research on singularities in algebraic geometry.

Reading notes

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• Ramanujan grew up poor, studied mostly on his own, and sent letters with results to prominent mathematicians in 1912.
• G.H. Hardy recognized the originality of Ramanujan’s work, brought him to Cambridge, and collaborated with him for five years.
• Ramanujan produced many results without proof and said his equations were given to him by the gods.
• His partition identities later connected to statistical mechanics, phase transitions, knot theory, string theory, number theory, representation theory, and symmetries.
• In recent work, his ideas appear in algebraic geometry through studies of curves, surfaces, and singularities.
• Hussein Mourtada’s research on singularities and arc spaces is part of this later line of work.
• Mathematicians still use Ramanujan’s identities as a source for new results in different branches of mathematics.