[kumarm]

If you want to understand how human potential was wasted in old world, Ramanujan belongs to a caste in India that is only caste that is supposed to be educated (Representing probably < 5% of population) in those days.

Ramanujan short life itself is a loss to the world, Imagine how many Ramanujan's were ignored where there is no G.H. Hardy and what about Ramanujans in the other 95%?

[maeil]

In the New World, the Ramanujans' lives are spent optimizing high-frequency trading, ads or video recommendation algorithms. This is arguably even worse for society than them not being discovered altogethrt.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

People like Ramanujan are on a different planet compared to your everyday PhD working stiffs. There's smart (PhD), there's genius (Einstein, Feynman, von Neumann), and then there are freaks of nature like Ramanujan.

[mangodrunk]

Ramanujan is obviously very gifted and was able to do exceptionally well given his circumstances, but to put him higher than those that you listed is wrong to me. There are many more mathematicians who solved problems that have more impact and those that started new branches of math. Ramanujan is overrated in my opinion.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I couldn't comment on the impact of his work, which anyways is evidentially still unfolding, but the WAY he seems to have worked is just bizarre - coming up with these deep baffling series formulae offered without proof. His mind seems to have worked in an extraordinary way.

[n4r9]

It's true that the unconscious way he came about his theorems puts him in a different category to other famous names. But I wouldn't rank him as highly as Von Neumann. That man made groundbreaking results in the foundations of mathematics, pure and applied mathematics, early computer science, quantum mechanics, economics, and more. I think Von Neumann might arguably be the most significant genius of the 20th Century, paralleled in history only perhaps by the likes of Newton and Leibniz.

Einstein made a few extremely valuable insights in theoretical physics, but I'd say the sheer breadth of comparable work that Von Neumann did across multiple fields makes him more outstanding.

[400thecat]

yes, but the contrast is striking: Von Neumann had privileged upbringing and education Just imagine what what Ramanujan could have been if he grew up in Von Neumann household

[mangodrunk]

He studied very hard and was exceptionally gifted, it wasn’t a mystery.

[hilux]

Do you know the saying "comparison is the thief of joy"?

It was intended to apply to oneself, but seems just as true when appreciating the genius of others. No need to diminish von Neumann, etc., AND doing so just diminishes your own credibility.

[Der_Einzige]

I'm an atheist, but why not take Ramanujan at his word when he says that god(s) gives him his equations?

I for one would ask him what we could do to make it easier for him to listen to the voice of god(s) rather than say "well akshually..."

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Well, he's dead, so there's that ...

I'm not sure there's much you can do to help someone at this level, other than perhaps take away outside distractions.

It's not remotely clear how Ramanujan's mind worked, or whether he really knew himself. He seems to have been a lot more highly functioning than an idiot savant, but still operating at a level that is hard to comprehend. Was this an expression of humility or devotion by Ramanujan, or was he just expressing his own lack of understanding of how his mind worked?

[regularfry]

There's a parallel there to Feynman, if you squint a bit. He seems to have been synaesthetic in a way that let him use the sensory part of his brain as a maths coprocessor, and he didn't understand it himself.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Feymann seems more understandable. He wanted to understand everything from first principles and derive it all himself, and spent a lifetime doing so, building himself up. He developed a huge repertoire of insights and mathematical tricks/approaches that could be brought to bear on whatever he put his mind to... It seems like he trained his mind to become what it was. The end result was of course incredible, and he would instantly or within hours see solutions to problems that colleagues had been stuck on for months.

Feynmann, like von Neumann, also seems more approachable/understandable in that he wasn't just operating at genius level, but was also a regular fun loving guy (strip clubs, bongo drums, safe hacking and all). Von Neumann and some of his Hungarian peers were famously referred to as "The Martians", but it's really Ramanujan who seems like the alien.

[fragmede]

Arguably. Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if they didn't want to be?

The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail.

[sealeck]

> The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail.

There might be a middle ground between the two?

[BobaFloutist]

I think they're talking about specifically the Unabomber, who was known to be a math genius too.

[sealeck]

I'm aware of that.

[mandmandam]

> Assuming that's actually where they end up, they earn lots of money and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We should force them to be mathematicians if they didn't want to be?

I think that if you tried you could imagine a world where Ramanujans are both supported and respected with nice lives, while also contributing to the future of the species rather than helping dig our own grave.

> The other version in the West is he moves to rural Montana and sends bombs through the mail.

Why in the world would those be the only two options?? What a profoundly strange thing to say.

[fragmede]

You mean a world where someone like Terence Tao gets to be a professor of mathematics at UCLA, where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences?

That brilliant geniuses have chosen corporate America and to not go into academia is yours and mine and the world's loss, but a defining feature of the Western world is that they get to make that choice for themselves.

[mandmandam]

> a defining feature of the Western world is that they get to make that choice for themselves.

... As if people outside the West have no self-determination? Pretty questionable, on multiple levels. And another indication of absurdly binary thinking/rhetoric. Good luck with that.

[ImHereToVote]

Those bombs might have done more good than his potential math career. Considering we just had our first AI millionaire. Perhaps there is hope for humanity to wake up.

[elgenie]

Ramanujan himself survived childhood smallpox and died at just 32 from what's thought to be complications from an earlier bout with dysentery. But he had lucked out in that he was born male in an urban setting in a high caste, with access to education, textbooks, and the language of the imperial core, and managed to make it to adulthood at all.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould

[scotty79]

If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the right (genius) person in the right place at the right time in history of science to marry together things other people figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.

[BobaFloutist]

It's not that individual makeup is so irrelevant, it's that if we assume (potential) Einsteins and Ramanujans follow a normal distribution (or really any random distribution), then the fact that so many people in the world live in situations where any genius will simply never be noticed means we are necessarily missing out on the vast majority of them.

[Cthulhu_]

This is why education and opportunities should be available for all, regardless of social / economic status. I reaped the benefits from that in the Netherlands where the government paid for most of my education (bachelor equivalent) and consequent professional life (white collar / middle class), instead of staying in my parents' / ancestors' "class" (blue collar / working class).

But people in the upper classes don't like that, so they're telling working class people that people even worse off are after their jobs.

[gen_greyface]

caste system in india is an evil that persists even today, and is a complex topic. majority of the indian-origin users on hackernews or people in the IT community are very likely upper castes. see [1] If you are interested to learn more about the caste system in india it is recommended to get your facts from multiple sources. start from [2]

[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987883 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India

[nnain]

Unfortunately, India's poorest still don't get govt benefits due for them: A few gobble up all the caste-based reservation from the govt. I have seen many people who have made a career out of talking about caste all the time.

I know more than 3 people in the US, who talk about caste all the time (as in that's their job now) but grew up in very privileged families.

[zozbot234]

Many Indians who talk about caste all the time, do it in ways that aren't immediately obvious. "What part of India are you from?" and "What's your surname?" are not just innocent questions.

[uncharted9]

This is such a common and dangerous rhetoric, which has been repeated millions of times in India today, that people are willing to believe that one community has wickedly tried to subjugate everyone by denying them the right to education. But this is completely false. The early government records of British India themselves attempt to record detailed demographic records of the communities that studied in the early 'modern' schools. And no, the Brahmins didn't have a monopoly.

This is similar to another popular narrative that no girl received an education until some sympathetic Englishman in partnership with a local woman allowed girls to go to school. What a load of BS.

[ykrishnan]

> ...only caste that is supposed to be educated...

Tall claim.

[1024core]

People in the West love to attribute everything in India to caste.