Do we like Srinivasa Ramanujan?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and the achievements are huge, but not much is documented about how he treated people day to day.
Ramanujan started with no university education. He was a clerk in the accounts department of the Madras Port Trust, on about £20 a year. In 1913 he wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy with around 100 theorems, many without much proof. Two other mathematicians had reportedly ignored his letter.
Hardy didn't ignore it. He encouraged Ramanujan to come to Cambridge, and Ramanujan arrived in 1914 for five years of work together. They developed the circle method for counting integer partitions. He got a Cambridge degree by research in 1916 and was elected to the Royal Society in 1918. Hardy later said of his theorems that “no one would have the imagination to invent them.”
It wasn't all smooth. The Quint reports that his religion reportedly forbade crossing the seas, so Hardy had to persuade him to go. It also describes a poor, uneducated Indian facing a very different culture in wartime England, and a mentorship that came with its own complications. A Scroll review argues Cambridge's elite treated him as an exotic curiosity, and that Hardy, though he noticed this and resented it, partly cast him as the other.
On the harm check, we found nothing. No sources turned up with him saying or doing anything against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and he kept no dodgy company. He did say his equations came from God, and that his family goddess Namagiri put them on his tongue while he slept. Faith alone is never a fail here. Honest gap: very little of his own voice survives in the pages we could read, so this rests on a thin record.
The recent news is a tribute, not a stoush. The SASTRA-Ramanujan Award, set up in 2005 with a US$10,000 prize, goes each year to a mathematician whose work is influenced by his legacy. This year's winner, Sarah Peluse, works in analytic number theory and related fields.
The real stuff is the work and what came after it. His notebooks hold about 4,000 claims, most since proved. His late work on mock theta functions has been cited for applications to black hole theory. That's a lot of mileage from a shipping clerk with a notebook.