Comment by alsetmusic
2 days ago
Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.
I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who exactly he was.
The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him
Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.
The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.