Srinivasa Ramanujan

Indian mathematician, almost entirely self-taught from a single outdated textbook of theorems, who produced thousands of original results in number theory, infinite series and continued fractions with little formal training and often no proof attached, relying on an extraordinary and largely unexplained intuition. In 1913 he wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, who recognized the results as the work of a mathematician of the highest class and brought him to Cambridge in 1914; their collaboration produced results still actively studied, including the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the partition function. He returned to India in 1919, already gravely ill, and died the following year at thirty two.