In the simplest array of digits [Ramanujan] detected wonderful properties: congruences, symmetries and relationships which had escaped the notice of even the outstandingly gifted theoreticians.
There is great exhilaration in breaking one of these things. . . . Ramanujan gives no hints, no proof of his formulas, so everything you do you feel is your own. [About verifying Ramanujan's equations in a newly found manuscript. ]
Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package. "
For my part, it is difficult for me to say what I owe to Ramanujan - his originality has been a constant source of suggestion to me ever since I knew him, and his death is one of the worst blows I have ever had.
That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.
No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. . . . Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later;. . . [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. . . . A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.
They [formulae 1. 10 - 1. 12 of Ramanujan] must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.
