The Men I admire most-1

Hi all. This post will be the first of a series of posts where I will discuss the people who have influnced me most and why? First I shall have to speak about the maverick Indian Genius Ramanujan, who with no formal mathematical education could excel in the highest level.
Anyone who is familiar with Ramanujan's story will feel a tinge of inspiration from him. Died at a very early age, countless mathematicians are still pondering about his theorems and formulas left behind in his famed Notebooks. It took Bruce C. Berndt the better part of a decade to edit and establish all the proofs that Ramanujan thought quite obvious. His genius even becomes more apparent when one tries to gauge the times and constraints that he faced in India in the 1900s.
For numerous reasons I have been inspired by Ramanujan, his zeal in mathematics coupled with the fact that he was a genius in the true sense of the word leaves no room for competition by anyone with him. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he had but just lived for 10 more years . I think he would have humbled Hilbert by giving the proofs of all his 23 problems and maybe he would have won the Fields' Medal many times over.
But all these seems now a waste of words. What is now required is that the world acknowledges this genius and place him at the pinacle of mathematics. Its time that Indian politicians thought of naming at least an institotion in honour of Ramanujan than naming every other institute after a peer of their party!

* Paul Erdos has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, Littlewood 30, Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.
o Bruce C. Berndt in Ramanujan's Notebooks : Part I (1994), "Introduction", p. 14

* He could remember the idiosyncrasies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It was Littlewood who said that every positive integer was one of Ramanujan's personal friends. I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
o G. H. Hardy, in Ramanujan : Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work (1940)

* Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends.
o John Littlewood, on hearing of the taxicab incident.

* In his book Scientific Edge, noted physicist Jayant Narlikar stated that "Srinivasa Ramanujan, discovered by the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy, whose great mathematical findings were beginning to be appreciated from 1915 to 1919. His achievements were to be fully understood much later, well after his untimely death in 1920. For example, his work on the highly composite numbers (numbers with a large number of factors) started a whole new line of investigations in the theory of such numbers." Narlikar also goes on to say that his work was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and "could be considered in the Nobel Prize class."[86] The work of other 20th century Indian scientists which Narlikar considered to be of Nobel Prize class were those of Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Megh Nad Saha and Satyendra Nath Bose.

I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends.' My reaction was, 'I wonder who said that; I wish I had.' In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands): 'It was Littlewood who said...' (What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with a poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud....) -John Littlewood.