Back in Ramanujan’s day, mathematics was a younger field — not quite as easy to enter as the study of the computational universe, but much closer than modern academic mathematics. And there were plenty of “random facts” being published: a particular type of integral done for the first time, or a new class of equations that could be solved. Many years later we would collect as many of these as we could to build them into the algorithms and knowledge base of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. But at the time probably the most significant aspect of their publication was the proofs that were given: the stories that explained why the results were true. Because in these proofs, there was at least the potential that concepts were introduced that could be reused elsewhere, and build up part of the fabric of mathematics.