In 1913, one of the world’s leading mathematicians opened a nine-page letter from an unknown accounting clerk in Madras and initially suspected fraud, because the formulas inside seemed impossible. They were real. Srinivasa Ramanujan, self-taught from a book that listed 5,000 theorems without proofs, working calculations on a slate because paper was too expensive, had independently produced results that would reshape 20th-century mathematics.

This episode follows the collision between raw genius and rigid academic structure: the boy who exhausted his tutors at 11, failed college repeatedly by refusing every subject but math, and nearly starved while producing nearly 3,900 results. It covers the famous letter G.H. Hardy couldn’t dismiss, the Cambridge years and the taxi-cab number 1729, the deathbed equations, and the Lost Notebook whose throwaway comments mathematicians were still decoding in 2012.

• Learning from a book of answers: how Carr’s proof-less synopsis shaped a unique mathematical mind
• The infinitely nested radicals that stumped a journal for six months, answered with a simple three
• The letter Hardy almost threw away: continued fractions that had to be true because no one could invent them
• From Fermat’s Last Theorem to the Fields Medal: the century-long ripple of 3,900 results
• The double-edged sword: would formal training have sharpened his rigor or crushed the imagination?