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Comment by mayankkaizen | Hacker News Reader

His life was interesting, but in tragic ways.

It is true that he went on to do crazy mathematics without any formal education but we really don't know what he could have achieved if he were well versed in contemporary mathematics or even had access to some advance textbooks.

It is also true, per se, that you don't have to be formally trained to make major contribution but I guess this really doesn't apply to Ramanujan. Being formally trained is one thing and being completely untrained is another. He didn't even have access to decent textbooks. He was starving. He had no mentor. It was his sheer genius which played a key role. Given his circumstances, I don't think any other ordinary person could achieve that much with any amount of hard work.

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Interesting viewpoint of the life of genius. I just read a book (Peak, 2016) on deliberate practice where there is compelling evidence that all works of genius stem from very hard work and lots of time.

Is it possible that Ramanujan would not have been so successful had he followed the standard learning path? Is it possible that Ramanujan's genius stems from a "genius" of what mathematical questions he chose to think about?

His genius stems from mathematical intuition. Even without formal education, he implicitly understood certain topics and was deriving proofs based on that intuition. Not everyone has that innately, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be learned.

>Is it possible that Ramanujan would not have been so successful had he followed the standard learning path?

Sure, it's possible. But there's always a problem when you teach yourself something, no matter how good at it you are, in that you don't know what you don't know.

Even if you're a genius and an autodidact, sometimes a little direction, a little mentoring, a little collaboration goes a long way in moving your understanding down the field.

Here's the biggest problem with a lack of education as far as math goes. How much time did he spend re-inventing the wheel because he didn't know which wheels had been invented? And he always did it better and faster than anyone else would have, or did? Probably not. His genius may have minimized the handicap of a lack of education. I somehow doubt that lack of an education was a benefit to him. Once he got into academia though through his recognized genius he probably learned a lot of things from a lot of people to try and fill in whatever gaps in his understanding he may have had. I very much doubt he lamented how learning things from experienced peers crippled his own genius...

No one is such a genius that they're an island unto themselves and no one and nothing any other human being has done matters. That type of genius is fantasy for Hollywood, not reality.

No matter who we are, or the level of our genius. We all stand on the shoulders of giants who came before.

> Even if you're a genius and an autodidact, sometimes a little direction, a little mentoring, a little collaboration goes a long way in moving your understanding down the field.

Sometimes this might bind you for the rest of your life to the epicycles of your era.

I think it’s definitely possible, maybe even likely.

Maybe it relates a little to that concept of “we were able to do it because we didn’t know it was impossible”?

Another aphorism that might somehow relate is, mistakes are considered an important part of creativity, in both art and science.

It’s hard me for me to escape the conclusion that there were likely some benefits related to stuff like this, that can force a person down paths less travelled.

As the same time, I bet there’s probably some way to build an entire house with a screwdriver. Would you want a great architect to work under those constraints?

Tangential, someone won a nobel prize for physics. There’s a case that we was greatly impacted by autism but functional, and speculation some of those personality traits helped him get there. If that were true, should we wish he never had it?

It seems clear that ironically, ignornace is sometimes an asset, but it’s almost impossible to untangle what and how much benefit was had in a particular case.

I’m sure I would have loved to had been his friend, know what he was like in real life. Even though I believe it’s plausible there were some insights related to his disadvantages, not sure anyone who could go back in time would not want to lay the world’s knowledge at his feet, and stand back and see what happened.

From what I've read about him, he didn't even derive his solutions. They "came to him" (he thought from the divine) and he had to be taught how to go backwards from the solution to formal proofs.

Based on that it sounds like he was a savant, rather than having taught himself a unique solving technique or depending on the questions he thought of. Personally, I think he'd have excelled equally well in a standard learning path. There are definitely other cases of people going the "standard" route and still possessing this sort of savant-like ability. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Demaine

Could it be that kids who only can multiply with a calculator are worse off than kids who don't have access to a calculator? I'm thinking him not having the text-books.

Either way I think it's interesting to consider what intellectual tools like computers are doing to our ability to think. A similar thing I read somewhere how kids no longer are able to use keyboards since they only use their phones.

And what about asking Alexa or Siri for the answer to everything? Not learning languages because everything can be machine-translated. Do such tools in fact make us dumber?

We will never know, but I think his lacking formal training helped him as it didn't confine him in a boundary and allowed him to choose his own path. Its often said he rediscovered many things already known, there by casting a bit of uselessness to his works. Be that as it may, I think, more than having access to established and formalized knowledge, he should have just lived longer. He would have been like the mathematicians in renaissance Europe who tackled and pursued whatever interested them and produced great stuff. Eventually, he would have done something remarkable. Of course, he could have ended up being utterly mediocre once his "beginners luck" faded, but it is more likely that he would have succeeded.

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