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Concerning Ramanujan...

Wikipedia says:

"Quoting K. Srinivasa Rao,[85] "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdős has passed on to us G. H. Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J.E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'"

If someone ranked him above Hilbert, that's quite an accomplishment.

I still am a fan of von Neumann, however.

Cheers!

I've got back issues of the American Mathematical Monthly lying around here and often I read bits and pieces of articles just for fun. There's one article that always draws my attention and my amazement: it's devoted to various "elementary" results of Ramanujan, many of them taken from his notebooks and never published. It's almost impossible to understand how anybody could have even guessed that some of those results were true. Truly bewildering. Of course, Ramanujan himself proved almost nothing...he just wrote the results down and went on, transcribing what "the Goddess" revealed to him during his dreams, as he once said. Several very competent mathematicians have spent large parts of their careers trying to prove Ramanujan's results. As it turns out, a small number of them weren't true or weren't quite true, but most of them were solid. He just somehow saw that they were true, but didn't prove them.

To adapt a famous quote, Ramanujan was a "plank from the wreck of Paradise cast up on the shores of idolatrous India."