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Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan
Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today.
Shortly after graduate school, Mourtada and two other young mathematicians, Jan Schepers and Clemens Bruschek, were studying the arc space associated with a very simple kind of singularity. It started when an Australian physicist named Rodney Baxter created a simplified model of a gas in order to understand phase transitions, the points at which a system’s behavior suddenly changes (like when liquid water turns to ice). Around the same time, the Rutgers mathematicians James Lepowsky and Robert Wilson proved that the Rogers-Ramanujan identities also arise in representation theory, the mathematical study of special symmetries.
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