The taxi cab story is easily a top-5 math story, and is quintessential Ramanujan.
Has there been a genius of his kind since? Maybe Terry Tao, but his work also lacks the ease and lack of machinery that Ramanujan had. Truly amazing.
Has there been a genius of his kind since? Maybe Terry Tao, but his work also lacks the ease and lack of machinery that Ramanujan had. Truly amazing.
For me one of them has to be of Évariste Galois[1], who, legend has it, hastily wrote fragments of his last mathematical discoveries on his shirt sleeves before fighting the duel that would end his life.
It's hard to compare mathematicians, but I suppose Erdős[1] would be in the conversation.
But honestly it’s kind of a silly game to rank mathematicians this way.
They most certainly do! Grothendieck’s work is heavy on definitions, but the essence of his work is that the right definitions obviate (and are seen to be right because they obviate) the need for heavy machinery. See the famous quote, taken from Wikipedia (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Quotes_...) because that’s the first place I found it:
> I can illustrate the ... approach with the ... image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado! A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration ... the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it ... yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance.