The Mathematician Nobody Expected from Madras

In 1913, G.H. Hardy, the most distinguished mathematician at Cambridge, received a letter from an unknown clerk in Madras, India. The envelope contained page after page of handwritten theorems — no formal proofs, no academic credentials, just raw mathematical insight from a man named Srinivasa Ramanujan who had no university degree.

Hardy's colleagues glanced at the letter and dismissed it. What serious mathematics could come from a shipping clerk in colonial India? But Hardy studied the pages late into the night. He recognized something others could not see — a mind of extraordinary depth working in total obscurity. "These must be true," Hardy later wrote, "because if they were not, no one would have had the imagination to invent them."

Hardy immediately sent for Ramanujan, and within a year the young Indian was at Cambridge, producing work that transformed number theory forever. Hardy had seen the genius before he ever met the man.

When Nathanael scoffed, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Philip simply said, "Come and see." And when Nathanael arrived, Jesus stunned him: "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you." The Almighty does not wait for our introductions. He sees us in our obscurity, knows the depth of what He placed within us, and calls us by name before we ever think to look for Him. The only question is whether we will come and see.