The Mind Creative FEBRUARY 2015 | Page 6

On a January morning in 1913, Prof. G.H. Hardy at Cambridge received a 10 page letter from Srinivasaa Ramanujan, a 23-year old unknown shipping clerk from Madras, India. The ten-page letter contained about 120 statements of theorems on infinite series, improper integrals, continued fractions, and other complex theorems pertaining to number theory. Initially, attributing the letter to be from a crank, Prof. Hardy disregarded the contents for a while. However, certain elements of the complex equations in the letter forced him to have a second look at the contents with his collaborator J. E. Littlewood and it did not take th