Describing Ramanujan as self-taught downplays that, within colonial India, he had access to some decent resources, and probably more than the median of the era: primary and secondary schooling, some interaction with older students, and a few of the books on higher mathematics. That was enough to open up all the possibilities he needed to "think mathematically". By his late teens it had become a total obsession, he ceased studying other subjects and failed out of academia. That is, the things he had already encountered were sufficient to get him started, and then he made things harder on himself because he couldn't play by the rules. But he replaced that disadvantage with persistence and trial and error, submitting what he had to whomever he could contact until, by the time it reached Hardy, it started to resemble formal language that other mathematicians understood.
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