Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan

One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada leapt onto his desk and started dancing. He wasn’t alone: Some of the graduate students who shared his Paris office were there, too. But he didn’t care. 

The mathematician realized that he could finally confirm a sneaking suspicion he’d first had while writing his doctoral dissertation, which he’d finished a few months earlier. He’d been studying special points, called singularities, where curves cross themselves or come to sharp turns. 

Now he had unexpectedly found what he’d been looking for, a way to prove that these singularities had a surprisingly deep underlying structure. 

Hidden within that structure were mysterious mathematical statements first written down a century earlier by a young Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had come to him in a dream.hematics.

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