The short answer to this question is a resounding “yes”! There are many examples of people who have not had access to formal education, but who have made significant contributions to the world of ideas and innovation. One of the most interesting stories is that of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
One morning in 1913, Godfrey Hardy, the famous number theorist at Cambridge University, received a large untidy envelope adorned with Indian stamps. Inside the envelope were pages of rough notes containing weird and unfamiliar looking mathematical theorems and identities–products of the intuition of a brilliant but unschooled mind. The originator of the letter was a poor 26-year-old clerk from Madras, India named Srinivasa Ramanujan who was living with his wife on twenty pounds a year. So impressive was the manuscript, that Hardy secured money for Ramanujan to visit Cambridge to collaborate with him in mathematical research.
Ramanujan’s deep intuitive understanding of numbers and their representation as infinite series spawned identities that were previously unknown to the world of mathematics. One of the remarkable infinite series he discovered for the reciprocal of pi is:
where the exclamation marks denote factorials (as well as excitement). Especially interesting is that this infinite series converges very quickly, with the first term yielding the correct value of pi to 6 decimal digits. Hardy had no idea how or where this arcane formula had emerged in the mind of this relatively unsophisticated youth. Though Ramanujan had no formal schooling in mathematics and didn’t understand mathematical rigor, nor have a firm grasp on the concept of “proof,” Hardy regarded him as a “natural genius,” because his mathematical intuition seemed to be unfettered by the constraints of formal training. In an unguarded moment, Hardy wrote of his protegé, “Had he been better educated, he would have been less Ramanujan.” In the seven years that followed, Ramanujan and Hardy established one of the most successful collaborations in the history of mathematics. Then, in a tragic turn of events, Ramanujan contracted tuberculosis while at the peak of his creativity and died.
In 1991, American biographer Robert Kanigel celebrated the genius of Ramanujan in his award-winning book, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (made into a movie in 2015.) The story of a poor boy from southern India, with a modicum of formal instruction, rising to the top of the mathematical world gives us pause for thought. Does it show that genius will be served, and that environment plays a minor role in intellectual attainment? Or does it suggest that genius is raw potential that can only reach its full flower when nurtured by a strong mentor or a rich environment?
Although the research remains inconclusive on this issue, there are several such stories in which genius emerges like a fragrant flower in what would appear to be an infertile environment , prompting us to ask, “What kind of environment is ideal for the nurture of brilliance?”
When Hardy said, “Had he been better educated, he would have been less Ramanujan,” he was suggesting that part of Ramanujan’s genius was that fact that he had not been “formally educated” at a young age, enabling him to use his intuition more freely, while escaping the bonds of mathematical rigor. Early exposure to what is traditionally accepted practice may inhibit unfettered exploration of ideas that transcend normal structured thinking. It may be that formal education provides us with powerful tools for exploring new ideas, but it may also limit the scope of our intuitive exploration by constraining us to specific patterns of thought. While formal education is still important for training the mind, we must also recognize that it may also limit the scope of purely intuitive perception. So many of our discoveries have emerged from the human subconscious and our respect for intuition must always be attributed high priority in our search for truth.
