Re:Indian math guy!?? (Score 2, Insightful)

Give me a break, I agree with the above comment to use "Indian math guy" when we are talkng about a Srinivasa Ramanujan is stupid beyond belief. He is one of the most well known mathematicians of the 20'th century and while it is true he started out mostly self taught, he came to work with G.H. Hardy at Cambridge University where for a tragically short time he was able to work with Hardy and others. Hardy, in particular, tried very hard to teach Ramanujan stuff he needed to know and he needed to know a lot, talent alone is not enough although with Ramanujan it came real close to overcoming his lousy math background.
Anyway, while Ramanujan was certainly posessed of great talent, it will always be an open question as to how much more he would have accomplished if he had been aware of work done by the great mathematicians of the past.
His insights were deep but occasionally flawed, he proved very little and his astonishing native genuius was almost certainly not fully utilized because he wouldn't or couldn't "stand on the shoulders of giants: (such as Riemann or Hadamard)... Or, as Hardy put it: "What was to be done in the way of teaching him modern mathematics? The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity."

Good short biographies may be found at:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/M athem aticians/Ramanujan.html
and http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Ramanuja n.html