Several years ago, a nephew of mine perfectly innocent of mathematical knowledge said to me, “Uncle, I have a visitor who talks of mathematics; I do not understand him; can you see if there is anything in his talk?” And in the plentitude of my mathematical wisdom, I condescended to permit Ramanujan to walk into my presence. A short uncouth figure, stout, unshaved, not overclean, with one conspicuous feature—shining eyes—walked in with a frayed notebook under his arm. He was miserably poor.

He opened his book and begun to explain some of his discoveries. I saw quite at once that there was something out of the way; but my knowledge did not permit me to judge whether he talked sense or nonsense. Suspending judgment, I asked him to come over again, and he did. And then he had gauged my ignorance and showed me some of his simpler results. These transcended existing books and I had no doubt that he was a remarkable man. Then, step by step, he led me to elliptic integrals and hypergeometric series, and at last his theory of divergent series not yet announced to the world converted me. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted a pittance to live on so that he might pursue his researches. He never craved for any distinctions. He wanted leisure; in other words, that simple food should be provided for him without exertion on his part and that he should be allowed to dream on.

From James R. Newman’s The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, Vol. I, 1956, p. 369.

Addendum (August 29, 1998)

While I was teaching at MIT, I would regularly stop at Dunkin’ Donuts in Central Square on my way down Massachusetts Avenue. Among the most interesting regulars around the counter there was an Indian or Arab fellow who would spend the entire time writing equations into a tattered notebook. He would hardly touch his coffee. For quite some time I was not sure whether he was a mathematical genius or a fool, but his intelligent eyes indicated there was something to all those integral signs he would pile up one behind another. It is likely that I have picked up this quotation about Ramanujan because of my fascination with the fellow from Dunkin’ Donuts. At any rate, I once saw him in the Mathematics Department at MIT, and I assumed he was a doctoral student. He was not young enough to be an undergraduate, and he was not dressed well enough to be a teacher there. Only last year I learned that a movie was made about this fellow, who was something like a maintenance man at MIT. I have not seen the film, featuring Robin Williams as an MIT professor, but I would not trust its veracity. To start with, I saw on a poster advertising the film that the hero was rendered white.