- Paul Graham: "As Kanigel writes in his excellent biography:" source ↗
Robert Kanigel's 1991 biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematical genius who, with virtually no formal training, produced thousands of theorems that stunned G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and continue to influence number theory, string theory, and computer science. The book traces Ramanujan's childhood in rural Tamil Nadu, his obsessive work on slates while working as a clerk, his improbable journey to Cambridge, the productive but strained collaboration with Hardy, and his tragic early death at 32. The story is as much about the nature of genius as about Ramanujan himself: what does it mean to see mathematical patterns that no one else can see, and what price does that gift exact?
Graham cites Kanigel directly in 'The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius' for the passage that illustrates Ramanujan's obsessive approach to mathematics: 'One Ramanujan scholar, B. M. Wilson, later told how Ramanujan's research into number theory was often “preceded by a table of numerical results, carried usually to a length from which most of us would shrink.”' Graham uses this as evidence for his theory that genius is not just natural ability plus hard work, but a 'disinterested obsession with something that matters' — the same quality he looks for in founders.
For a founder, the book is the ultimate validation of Graham's bus-ticket theory. Ramanujan's output was not the result of discipline or ambition in any conventional sense; he simply could not stop thinking about numbers. The compulsion looked like wasting time to everyone around him, including his own family. That willingness to pursue an obsessive interest regardless of how it looks to others is, in Graham's framework, the closest thing to a guarantee of extraordinary output. The book also shows what happens when raw talent meets an environment that can nurture it — Hardy's role as patron and translator of Ramanujan's intuitions is a model for what a good co-founder or early investor does.