Being a Brahmin does not put rice on the table. Again, he was on the brink of starving, he says; this screens off any group considerations - we know he was very poor.

And not just that, but he had more education than the poorest Indians, and probably more than the second poorest. And got his hands on a math textbook, which was probably pretty low probability.

My bet is that there aren't a lot of geniuses doing stoop labor, especially in traditional peasant situations, but there are some who would have been geniuses if they'd had enough food when young and some education.

Well, it is also democratic in the sense that what convinces the mathematical community is what matters, and there's no 'President of Mathematics' or 'Academie de la Mathematique' laying down the rules, but yes, 'meritocratic' is closer to what I meant.

Most of those people either seem to come from middle-class or better backgrounds, fall well below Einstein, or both (I mean, Eliezer Yudkowsky?)

From his letter to G.H. Hardy:

I am already a half starving man. To preserve my brains I want food and this is my first consideration. Any sympathetic letter from you will be helpful to me here to get a scholarship either from the university or from the government.

Googling the text finds it quoted a bunch of places.

Besides his letter to Hardy, Wikipedia cites The Man Who Knew Infinity (on Libgen; it also quotes the 'half starving' passage), where the cited section reads:

Describing the obsession with college degrees among ambitious young Indians around this time, an English writer, Herbert Compton, noted how "the loaves and fishes fall far short of the multitude, and the result is the creation of armies of hungry 'hopefuls'-the name is a literal trans- lation of the vernacular generic term omedwar used in describing them- who pass their lives in absolute idleness, waiting on the skirts of chance, or gravitate to courses entirely opposed to those which education in- tended." Ramanujan, it might have seemed in 1908, was just such an omedwar. Out of school, without a job, he hung around the house in Kumbakonam.

Times were hard. One day back at Pachaiyappa's, the wind had blown off Ramanujan's cap as he boarded the electric train for school, and Ramanujan's Sanskrit teacher, who insisted that boys wear their traditional tufts covered, asked him to step back out to the market and buy one. Ramanujan apologized that he lacked even the few annas it cost. (His classmates, who'd observed his often-threadbare dress, chipped in to buy it for him.)

Ramanujan's father never made more than about twenty rupees a month; a rupee bought about twenty-five pounds of rice. Agricultural workers in surrounding villages earned four or five annas, or about a quarter rupee, per day; so many families were far worse off than Ramanujan's. But by the standards of the Brahmin professional community in which Ramanujan moved, it was close to penury.

The family took in boarders; that brought in another ten rupees per month. And Komalatammal sang at the temple, bringing in a few more. Still, Ramanujan occasionally went hungry. Sometimes, an old woman in the neighborhood would invite him in for a midday meal. Another family, that of Ramanujan's friend S. M. Subramanian, would also take him in, feeding him dosai, the lentil pancakes that are a staple of South Indian cooking. One time in 1908, Ramanujan's mother stopped by the Subramanian house lamenting that she had no rice. The boy's mother fed her and sent her younger son, Anantharaman, to find Ramanujan. Anantharaman led him to the house of his aunt, who filled him up on rice and butter.

To bring in money, Ramanujan approached friends of the family; perhaps they had accounts to post, or books to reconcile? Or a son to tutor? One student, for seven rupees a month, was Viswanatha Sastri, son ofa Government College philosophy professor. Early each morning, Ramanujan would walk to the boy's house on Solaiappa Mudali Street, at the other end of town, to coach him in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. The only trouble was, he couldn't stick to the course material. He'd teach the standard method today and then, if Viswanatha forgot it, would improvise a wholly new one tomorrow. Soon he'd be lost in areas the boy's regular teacher never touched.

Sometimes he would fly off onto philosophical tangents. They'd be discussing the height of a wall, perhaps for a trigonometry problem, and Ramanujan would insist that its height was, of course, only relative: who could say how high it seemed to an ant or a buffalo? One time he asked how the world would look when first created, before there was anyone to view it. He took delight, too, in posing sly little problems: If you take a belt, he asked Viswanatha and his father, and cinch it tight around the earth's twenty-five-thousand-mile-Iong equator, then let it out just 271" feet-about two yards-how far off the earth's surface would it stand? Some tiny fraction of an inch? Nope, one foot.

Viswanatha Sastri found Ramanujan inspiring; other students, however, did not. One classmate from high school, N. Govindaraja Iyengar, asked Ramanujan to help him with differential calculus for his B.A. exam. The arrangement lasted all of two weeks. You can think of calculus as a set of powerful mathematical tools; that's how most students learn it and what most exams require. Or else you can appreciate it for the subtle questions it poses about the nature of the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. Ramanujan, either unmindful of his students' practical needs or unwilling to cater to them, stressed the latter. "He would talk only of infinity and infinitesimals," wrote Govindara,ja, who was no slouch intellectually and wound up as chairman oflndia's public service commission. "I felt that his tuition [teaching] might not be of real use to me in the examination, and so I gave it up."

Ramanujan had lost all his scholarships. He had failed in school. Even as a tutor of the subject he loved most, he'd been found wanting. He had nothing.

And yet, viewed a little differently, he had everything. For now there was nothing to distract him from his notebooks-notebooks, crammed with theorems, that each day, each week, bulged wider.

"The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians" comes to mind as an interesting recent natural experiment where the floodgate of Russian mathematical talent was unleashed after the collapse of the USSR and many of them successfully rose in America despite academic math being a zero-sum game; consistent with meritocracy.

At the outlier level, I think so -- see e.g. Perelman. At the normal professor-of-mathematics level, probably not.

Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation.

A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.

Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy.

Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.

Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality.

Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing's homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisexual Kim Philby nearly became head of MI6!) EDIT: pg137-144 of the Ramanujan book I've been quoting discusses the extensive homosexuality at Cambridge and its elite, and how tolerance of homosexuality ebbed and flowed, with the close of the Victorian age being particularly intolerant.

The right conjugate for Newton, by the way, reads 'and his heretical Christian views were discovered, he was fired from Cambridge - like his successor as Lucasian Professor - and died a martyr'.

I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.

The problem is, we have these stories. We have Ramanujan who by his own testimony was on the verge of starvation - and if that is not poor, then you are not using the word as I understand it - and we have William Shakespeare (no aristocrat he), and we have Epicurus who was a slave. There is no censorship of poor and middle-class Einsteins. And this is exactly what we would expect when we consider what it takes to be a genius like Einstein, to be gifted in multiple ways, to be far out on multiple distributions (giving us a highly skewed distribution of accomplishment, see the Lotka curve): we would expect a handful of outliers who come from populations with low means, and otherwise our lists to be dominated by outliers from populations with higher means, without any appeal to Marxian oppression or discrimination necessary.

Yes - but whose average?