How was Srinivasa Ramanujam able to contribute to Pure Mathematics at large in his short life?
There is a book called “The Man Who Knew Infinity” by Robert Kanigel about the life of Ramanujan. Read that. What was interesting about Ramanujan was that he was perhaps obsessively focused on one branch of mathematics, number theory. There were many areas of math unknown to him. But with that narrow focus he was able to accomplish all of the work that impressed so many. Keep in mind that of the 3000 “theorems” that you mention, some were just relatively simple algebraic manipulations, albeit ones that nobody else had thought of before. Perhaps that was his greatest genius: to see things that so many others overlooked.
