Because it lies on a cool, ethereal plane beyond the everyday passions of human life, and because it can be fully grasped only through a language in which most people are unschooled, Ramanujan’s work grants direct pleasure to only a few—a few hundred mathematicians and physicists around the world, perhaps a few thousand. The rest of us must either sit on the sidelines and, on the authority of the cognoscenti, cheer, or else rely on vague, metaphoric, and necessarily imprecise glimpses of his work.
