Ramanujan

“We will not let water from our river enter into the other state at a time when our farmlands are barren,” said T. Ramanujan, the leader of a farmers’ union in Karnataka.

In 2011, Delhi University dropped an essay by scholar AK Ramanujan on the various iterations of the epic after protests by hard-line Hindu groups, who complained that the versions recounted there offended religious beliefs.

Ramanujan immediately contradicted his friend: “It is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

A similar but more extreme example involves the career of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who produced groundbreaking theorems after being plucked out of obscurity based on the recognition of his raw talent by Godfrey Hardy of Cambridge University.

Palaeontologist Mary Anning, crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan were among the contenders.