Comment by 2b3a51

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.