THE legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was known for coming up with unconventional mathematical ideas. He has now inspired a computer program that does the same. Called the Ramanujan Machine, the software poses conjectures for generating equations whose output is fundamental mathematical constants such as π and e . A conjecture is an unproven mathematical statement. Born in 1887 in what is now Tamil Nadu in India , Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematician. He often claimed that his results came to him in a dream, and disliked the formal proofs favoured by most mathematicians. Ramanujan moved to the UK in 1914 to study at the University of Cambridge with the mathematician G. H. Hardy, and their long friendship led to a series of important results in the field of number theory. “Ramanujan had a way of producing things which looked true [but] he couldn’t necessarily convince other people why they were true,” says Saul Schleimer at the University of Warwick, UK.