Then he went on: “You will however understand that, before I can judge properly of the value of what you have done, it is essential that I should see proofs of some of your assertions.” It was an interesting thing to say. To Hardy, it wasn’t enough to know what was true; he wanted to know the proof — the story — of why it was true. Of course, Hardy could have taken it upon himself to find his own proofs. But I think part of it was that he wanted to get an idea of how Ramanujan thought — and what level of mathematician he really was.