Notes from a trip to India in the footsteps of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught genius so far ahead of his time that mathematicians are still struggling to understand his ideas a century after his death at 32

1. There is a form of Buddhism so potent, adherents say, that to hear its name spoken is to receive a promise of premature enlightenment, of early freedom from the wheel of incarnations. Something similar is true of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the super-genius who was born into deep poverty in an obscure part of southern India, who taught himself mathematics from a standard textbook, and in total isolation became a mathematician of such power that a hundred years after his death, at the age of thirty-t…