India, July 19 -- The deepest tragedy of Ramanujan's life and his works is not that India lacked extraordinary minds. It is that the modern world had been methodically conditioned to believe that universal genius could only be certified by specific, Western institutions.

In 1912, Srinivasa Ramanujan was employed as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust, managing shipping accounts and port fees. To the colonial administration, he was a low-level government worker. But within the Indian mathematical community, his reputation was already well-established. Mathematicians like V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, who founded the Indian Mathematical Society, and civil servant R. Ramachandra Rao had scrutinized his dense notebooks, recognized his exceptional ability...