Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) has been called the greatest mathematician of his generation. He was a largely self-taught Indian mathematician who had an incredible ability to see patterns in maths equations that are highly complicated and often branched out in many different directions; he discovered amazingly fruitful mathematical relationships between numbers using techniques that were completely novel when he started working on them, even though they depended on centuries-old mathematics like elliptic integrals and modular equations.
Ramanujan’s greatness was more than just with numbers, however; his incredibly prodigious talent extended to poetic writing, philosophy and music as well. He was a genius of multidimensionality in every sense of the word.
Ramanujan’s prodigious talent was also a burden to him; when he looked at numbers, he couldn’t help seeing patterns that simply weren’t there in his mind’s eye. Even though this is something that most hard-core mathematicians would kill for, Ramanujan’s visions inextricably drove him towards highly complex maths problems that were almost impossible to solve and led him to mental illness. In 1916, Ramanujan’s mental health deteriorated and he became a paranoid schizophrenic. When Ramanujan wasn’t hallucinating mathematical patterns in his mind and believing that they were real, he thought that he was cursed by the gods. When people pronounced him insane, he took it as confirmation of his reality, and it only made him more delusional.
Ramanujan’s genius was revealed to the world through letters from him to his friends that were published after his death in 1920; some of these letters had so much esoteric information in them that they’ve never been fully deciphered. Some of his friends were convinced that his letters weren’t authentic, and urged him to stop writing them. He was one of the most famous mathematicians in the world for only a few months before he died in 1920 at age 32.
Ramanujan’s story is described by Paulos in “The New York Review of Books” (2005). Ramanujan solved some very difficult maths problems and the solving process sometimes felt like it was leading him more and more into paranoid schizophrenia. The New Yorker magazine wrote extensively about Ramanujan’s mental illness, crediting author Francis Wheen with doing the first scholarly study on this subject.