Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan developed his mathematical research alone, producing work too novel and unfamiliar for most professionals to recognize. In 1913 he wrote to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge, who saw the theorems as extraordinary and brought him to England. Over his short career Ramanujan compiled nearly 3,900 results - identities, equations, partition formulae, mock theta functions - many opening entire new areas of mathematics. He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and the first Indian Fellow of Trinity College. Illness forced his return to India in 1919; he died the next year at 32, still generating new ideas in his final letters. His "lost notebook" from that last year, rediscovered in 1976, carried theorems researchers are still unraveling - comments he called "simple properties" turned out to be profound number theory results hidden for a century.