So how is it that Ramanujan managed in effect to predict all these deep principles of later mathematics? I think there are two basic logical possibilities. The first is that if one drills down from any sufficiently surprising result, say in number theory, one will eventually reach a deep principle in the effort to explain it. And the second possibility is that while Ramanujan did not have the wherewithal to express it directly, he had what amounts to an aesthetic sense of which seemingly random facts would turn out to fit together and have deeper significance.
