Later, in high school, Ramanujan saw how trigonometric functions could be expressed in a form unrelated to the right triangles in which, superficially, they were rooted. It was a stunning discovery. But it turned out that the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler had anticipated it by 150 years. When Ramanujan found out, he was so mortified that he secreted the papers on which he had recorded the results in the roof of his house.
