3 ms·
Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on
by alsetmusic 1y ago
Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.
- wmwmwm 1y agoI’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
- trollbridge 1y ago20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who exactly he was.
- youngtaff 1y agoThe Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
- 2b3a51 1y agoA bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level. The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.