- Lived:
- 22 December 1887, Erode → Kumbakonam → Madras (Chennai) → Cambridge, 1914–19 → Madras; died 26 April 1920, aged thirty-two
- Field:
- pure mathematics — number theory, infinite series, partitions — entirely self-taught
- The Big Idea:
- A clerk with no degree filled notebooks with some 3,900 mathematical results nobody had taught him, mailed a sample to Cambridge, and left behind formulas so deep that mathematicians spent the rest of the century proving them true — and physicists now use his last discovery on black holes.
- In their words:
- "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." (as friends in Madras remembered him saying)
- If you remember one thing:
- On 16 January 1913 a thirty-rupees-a-month clerk posted nine pages of theorems to a stranger in Cambridge. The stranger's first thought was fraud. By midnight he knew he was reading the work of a genius with no equal alive — and the century of mathematics that followed has kept agreeing with the midnight verdict.