This is a story, too, about what you do with genius once you find it. Ramanujan was brought to Cambridge by an English mathematician of aristocratic mien and peerless academic credentials, G. H. Hardy, to whom he had written for help. Hardy saw that Ramanujan was a rare flower, one not apt to tolerate being stuffed methodically full of all the mathematical knowledge he’d never acquired in India. “I was afraid,” he wrote, “that if I insisted unduly on matters which Ramanujan found irksome, I might destroy his confidence and break the spell of his inspiration.”
