Ramanujan and π

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the greatest Indian mathematician of the modern era, could come from a sociology textbook on the making of geniuses. Impoverished youth, inadequate education, misunderstood by those around him, forced to adopt an independent line. All of a sudden someone spots the youth's brilliance, appreciates his visionary thinking, takes him under his wing, encourages him and elicits from him in the space of a few years an incredible wealth of discoveries. This creative period is followed by illness, homesickness and untimely death. In the ensuing period his work is largely lost without trace, known only to a few privileged persons, forgotten by the world at large. Then 60 years later he enjoys a kind of revival. A few people begin to get interested in him, enquire into his life and milieu, and suddenly this interest is kindled into a raging fire as a storm of excitement spreads through India and across the mathematically minded world. Jubilation culminates in celebrations, conferences and posthumous honours on the occasion of the centenary of Ramanujan's date of birth in 1987.