Comments by "Faithless Hound" (@faithlesshound5621) on "Why Haven't You Heard Of One Of History's Greatest Geniuses?" video.

So there's something to be said for just reading the books at home, and not going to lectures and doing homework for a teacher? Usually educators insist the latter is the best path to take. Einstein was a bit like that too: he stopped going to lectures and chose himself what books to study. That worked out for him, because his electricity professor did not teach Maxwell's Equations, which turned out to be the basis of Special Relativity. Ramanujan DID have formal education, but he got thrown out for not bothering (AFTER his school years) with the multiple other subjects that colleges insisted on at that time. This stymies many boys and girls who have a specific interest and don't want to spend time and effort on everything else. If we insist every child must have a broad, general, education we block the single-minded geniuses. The funny thing is that this does not apply to sports and fine arts: there are hundreds of kids spending several hours a day perfecting their tennis or football skills, or practising an instrument, but that's accepted and rewarded, and leads for a few of them to fame and fortune. This was understood at the end of the 19th century, when there was talk of the music colleges and art schools in London joining the federal University of London. The university insisted that they would have to adopt its general requirements for admission, which they realised would bar too many boys and girls who could profit from studying with them. For Ramanujan, it was fortunate that Trinity College, Cambridge (or specifically GH Hardy) was able to be more flexible in whom it chose to admit than the Indian institutions of that time.
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You may have hit on something with "had to translate the math himself." These days most students in the Anglo-American world are monolingual as far as studying goes. There may be some benefit as well as hardship from having to engage with a different language and culture in an academic setting, as many advanced students have to do in most of the world. In earlier times, the Republic of Letters read and wrote in languages which no ordinary people spoke: the classical forms of Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Chinese. Ramanujan's mentor at Cambridge, GH Hardy, gives a lot of credit to his own study of Camille Jordan's Cours d'Analyse de l'École Polytechnique, a copy of which he smuggled into his old school library for maths enthusiasts such as Freeman Dyson to find. Dyson himself studied a maths text in German and translated another from Russian as a schoolboy.
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Ramanujan's social situation also worth commenting on. He came from a poor Brahmin family: i.e from a community that had a tradition of and respect for learning, which gave him access to a network of patrons who gave him sinecure work and introductions to academics and the chance to publish in local mathematical journals. At the same time his family was not too devout, so he was not forced to concentrate on Sanskrit, one of the subjects he did not do well in, or to devote himself to the study and practice of religion. Being a subject in a British colony had its disadvantages, but it also afforded a few the chance to study abroad. If he had lived in one of the Princely States of India, his caste would have been a definite advantage, since in his time some like Travancore prohibited the lowest castes from going to school. His situation resembled that of a poor Jewish scholar in Central Europe, who did not belong to an ultra-orthodox community, and could similarly benefit from his community's resources. Unlike them, his community was not persecuted in their homeland, though they would be elsewhere in the Empire.
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@archockencanto1645 That reminds me of when some kids asked the senior French teacher at High School what the point of his subject was. He explained that if you did well enough in the school leaving exams you could go to university to study French (which involved a year living and working in France), get a degree with honours in French, go on to a college of education for a year, and finally become a French master in a high school! I suppose you could work you way up to the top of the school and then the education system after that, but it all sounded circular to me. That would apply to a lot of subjects which you study so that you can teach them.
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@rahulsharma-ht7ut Slow down! In your frenzy you keep hitting the wrong keys while you try to say several different things at once. Brahmins discovered or invented everything centuries ago but kept quiet about it and made no use of them? Or the world's collective unconscious knows everything already? Or is it the goddess that knows everything? Many people have said that they wake up having worked something out that they had not managed to do while they were awake. That could mean they carried on working it out unconsciously, or in their sleep, rather than that the gods or ancestors put into their heads. In the olden days it was common to credit a "Muse" for one's artistic work, but nobody took that literally. More recently it was compulsory to give all credit to "Comrade Stalin," or "The Invincible Might of Mao Tse-tung Thought," so your murderous demagogue is in good company.
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@9usuck0 Yeah, I see what you were getting at. It's like Newton benefitted from spending time on his own in lockdown during the plague after he had mastered the basics. By then he didn't need to be "set right" by his teachers and could fly on his own.
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@blobofconsciousness I read about some other mathematician who described having an unusually severe headache for several hours one day while he was wrestling with some problem, and after it had passed realising that he knew the solution. Others describe dreaming of a solution, such as Kekulé's discovery of the benzene ring. If you want, you can call that divine intervention, but I would say that something was going on their unconscious minds.
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Hardy is famous for having written a classic "Course of Pure Mathematics" and in genetics for having discovered the Hardy-Weinberg equation.
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*Sri
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Strangely enough, James Croll came up with an astronomical theory of climate change, which eventually led to Milankovitch's cycles, while working as a janitor at Anderson's College in Glasgow some 50 years earlier.
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@niks660097 Of course, most single-minded people are not geniuses. If you spend your teenage years playing football, you MIGHT become a professional player for a few years, and then work as a coach or sports teacher, but more likely you will just be a good amateur player with a poor education.
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We don't tell a sculptor to go away and learn to draw, paint and weave before we let him loose with a chisel. Or maybe we do? We're starting to do that with footballers, who have to spend hours in the gym and on the track, whereas they used to just practise after a day's work in a factory or down a mine.
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It's a good story, but Ramanujan was not completely untaught in mathematics. According to Wikipedia, at 11 he was tutored by two university students who were lodgers in his parents' house. He studied maths at high school and was lent an advanced textbook. He attended two colleges, where he fell foul of the need to study 3 or 4 subjects in the first year. Afterwards he benefitted from the patronage of well-placed local mathematicians belonging to his community who secured him employment where he had spare time to do mathematical work for publication.
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Ramanujan was born in Mysore State in the 19th century. That the map of India showing his birthplace does not reflect 21st century national boundaries in the Himalayas is irrelevant. There's no need to "make amends."
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P Snape Who's being a dimwit here? Ramanujan lived in Mysore and Madras, so whether the map of India shows the borders of Jammu & Kashmir accurately is irrelevant to those who don't go looking for a fight.
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P Snape Now you're just being silly. The sketch map is only of use to those who don't know where Indian cities are. Indians would not need it, nor would anyone use it to determine boundaries in the Himalayas.
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