Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician, who is quite famous if you’re into math, I guess, though his name would have meant nothing to me if I hadn’t read David Leavitt’s novel The Indian Clerk, which tells a fictionalized version of Ramanujan’s time at Cambridge University.
Although I’m sure I wouldn’t understand the least bit of their contents, I wouldn’t mind taking a closer look at Ramanujan’s notebooks:
Read more about them at The Hindu : Sci-Tech / Science : 3 notebooks of Ramanujan being microfilmed.
Thanks for mentioning this novel. I will definitely pick up it up.
I knew of Ramanujan through math lore and “The Man Who Knew Infinity” by Kanigel.
I hope the notebook preservation attempts succeed.