Srinivasa Ramanujan

1887-1920

The measure of his knowledge was as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems…to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fraction was… beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in analytical theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy’s theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of complex variable was.

He worked on 4000 original theorems.