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When Cambridge University professor of mathematics Godfrey Hardy received a letter from a clerk working at the port of Madras in 1913, it's safe to say he was fairly sure someone was having him on. At first glance, the letter had all the hallmarks of a scam. It came from a far-flung country, India, and the author, a certain S. Ramanujan, mentioned early on that he was strapped for cash.
Rather bizarrely, he also listed his age as being about 23. But just as the alarm bells were beginning to ring in Hardy's mind, the letter took a turn for the strange. Because whoever this S. Ramanujan was, he claimed to have made some startling discoveries in the advanced mathematical fields of infinite series, improper integrals, Continued fractions and number theory.
These were not terms your average con artist was likely to be familiar with, and so intrigued, Hardy read on. To support his claims, S. Ramanujan, this lowly clerk who apparently didn't even know how old he was, had followed his cover letter with 11 pages containing 120 mathematical theorems.
Hardy recognized several of the equations from the work of famous mathematicians, but others were new to him, and a few looked like nothing he'd ever seen before in his 17-year career working in one of the world's leading institutions for pure mathematics. Some of the formulas even appeared to be related to areas of study in which Hardy considered himself to be the world's leading expert, and yet to his surprise, he found he could hardly follow them. The mathematics on display certainly looked impressive but the letter was so downright weird that to begin with Hardy didn't really know what to make of it.
But eventually after sharing the missive with some of his esteemed colleagues in the maths department at Cambridge he was forced to conclude that it was no fraud. Whoever this clerk from the port of madras was he was a truly exceptional. mathematician. As it happens, that conclusion was actually some way off the mark because the author of the letter, Srinivasa Ramanujan, wasn't merely exceptional.
He was quite literally one of the greatest mathematicians ever to have lived. Now I've got a mystery for all of you that surveyed an answer for almost a century. Why would one of the richest families in history store almost a billion dollars of their wealth?
away in fine art. Well there's lots of theories as to why that might be the case and maybe we'll never know for sure but we do know some facts about contemporary art today. Contemporary art prices outpaced the S&P 500 by 164% from 1995 to 2021. With numbers like that you can imagine why the Rockefellers are part of a trend that continues today where over two-thirds of billionaires allocate more than 20% of their overall portfolio to art. Now, the mystery is, how do you do it?
Well, that I can give you a concrete answer to. With masterworks. I've talked about them on this channel before, and I think what they're doing is genius.
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and that it's reserved for the ultra wealthy. In fact, members of the 42 community have already invested with Masterworks. Now is the right time to look at diversifying your portfolio and Masterworks is how I'm choosing to do that.
And luckily for you, Masterworks has provided my viewers with priority access. So go check them out using the link in the description and start investing in art today. The fact that we even know his name is a minor miracle in itself. Born in 1887 in humble circumstances in the Indian city of Erode, Ramanujan was the eldest of five children but only one of his siblings, a brother, made it to adulthood.
It was a pretty close-run thing for Ramanujan as well. At the age of two he contracted smallpox, a deadly disease that's thought to have killed more than four and a half million Indians between 1868 and 1907.