But back to the story. Hardy and Littlewood didn’t really have a good mental model for Ramanujan. Littlewood speculated that Ramanujan might not be giving the proofs they assumed he had because he was afraid they’d steal his work. (Stealing was a major issue in academia then as it is now.) Ramanujan said he was “pained” by this speculation, and assured them that he was not “in the least apprehensive of my method being utilized by others.” He said that actually he’d invented the method eight years earlier, but hadn’t found anyone who could appreciate it, and now he was “willing to place unreservedly in your possession what little I have.”