[dannykwells]

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.

[pmoriarty]

What are the other 4 top math stories?

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois

[dboreham]

Fun mathematical tourism stop: go up to the top of the Tour Montparnasse. Look straight down. Galois is buried in the cemetery below. Nobody knows where, but he's down there somewhere.

[madcaptenor]

My understanding is that this legend has been debunked, but ironically I can't find a source. (My instinct is to blame E. T. Bell.)

[mindcrime]

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.

It's hard to compare mathematicians, but I suppose Erdős[1] would be in the conversation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

[rq1]

Yes definitely: Alexandre Grothendieck. And Terrence Tao can’t sit at his table (yet?).

But honestly it’s kind of a silly game to rank mathematicians this way.

[solveit]

Grothendieck and lack of machinery do not belong in the same sentence. But yes, it is kind of silly.

[JadeNB]

> Grothendieck and lack of machinery do not belong in the same sentence.

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.

[solveit]

I mean, we're arguing semantics at this point, but these definitions we're talking about are things like schemes, which pretty much everybody would call heavy machinery.

[QuesnayJr]

There have been lots. Twenty? Thirty? A hundred? It was a good century plus for mathematical genius.

[lvncelot]

John von Neumann is someone that often comes up in this context - there are numerous anecdotes on how he was perceived as frightingly clever; also his body of work is beyond impressive.

[amrx431]

I am surprised no one in including Gauss.

[mindcrime]

Didn't Gauss live and die before Ramanujan was born?