Just a year before his death in 1920 at the age of 32, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan came upon a remarkable pattern in a special list of whole numbers.
The list represented counts of how many ways a given whole number can be expressed as a sum of positive integers. For example, 4 can be written as 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. Including 4 itself but excluding different arrangements of the same integers (2 + 1 + 1 is considered the same as 1 + 2 + 1), there are five distinct possibilities, or so-called partitions, of the number 4. Similarly, the integer 5 has seven partitions.