In the previous post, you got to know some facts about Ramanujan. Let’s see what their colleagues said about Ramanujan:
G. H. Hardy, his colleague from the University of Cambridge, England said, “the theorems defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before”,[14]:168 and that they “must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them”.
Another Mathematician and his colleague Littlewood commented, “I can believe that he’s at least a Jacobi“,[55] while Hardy said, “he can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi.”[56]
At the age of 17, when he calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places and independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers.[14]:90 His peers at the time said they “rarely understood him” and “stood in respectful awe” of him.[14]:27
V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, then deputy collector in 1910 and a founder of the Indian Mathematical Society recalled,
“I was struck by the extraordinary mathematical results contained in [the notebooks]. I had no mind to smother his genius by an appointment in the lowest rungs of the revenue department.”[35]
When Hardy gets into a taxi with number 1729 to see Ramanujan at a hospital in Putney. Hardy said during a conversation about the dullness of that number and Ramanujan replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
Hardy quoted Littlewood as saying, “Every positive integer was one of [Ramanujan’s] personal friends.”
