Srinivasa
Ramanujan
Mathematician
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who, despite little formal training, made extraordinary contributions to number theory and infinite series. Growing up in poverty in India, Ramanujan was deeply religious. He believed his mathematical gifts were bestowed by a higher spiritual source, which is remarkable given his prolific output of formulas that baffled even veteran mathematicians.
Divine Inspiration
"An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God," Ramanujan famously said. He explicitly credited his family goddess, Namagiri (a form of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi), with inspiring his mathematics. According to accounts by his friends and biographers, Ramanujan often asserted that "It was Goddess Namagiri... to whom he owed his mathematical gifts. Namagiri would write equations on his tongue. Namagiri would bestow insights in his dreams."
In one dream, he saw blood drenching a screen and a hand writing out mathematical integrals in it – which he interpreted as the goddess revealing knowledge to him. These startling claims were not mere superstition to Ramanujan; they aligned with his lived experience of sudden, intuitive mathematical revelations.
Mathematical Manifestation
Indeed, many of theorems he wrote down came to him fully formed, and only later did he or collaborators prove them rigorously. The influence of this belief on his success is profound: it gave Ramanujan unshakeable confidence in the validity of his ideas. He pursued complex infinite series and identities because he felt they were true, as if guided by a divine voice, even when he couldn't formally justify them.
This conviction, born of what he viewed as higher consciousness or manifestation through the goddess, led to groundbreaking results in mathematics. While Western colleagues like G.H. Hardy were initially skeptical of Ramanujan's out-of-nowhere formulas, many proved correct – lending credence to Ramanujan's insistence that a divine intuitive connection fueled his genius.