E.H. Neville to Dewsbury
Dated 28-1-1914

E.H. Neville met Ramanujan and saw his priceless Notebooks. He was introduced by Prof. Richard Littlehailes (with the Observatory in Madras) to “everyone who carried weight in the University or in the civil administration”. Neville, wrote on January 28, 1914 to the Registrar of the University of Madras about “the importance of securing to Ramanujan a training in the refinements of modern methods and a contact with men who knew what range of ideas have been explored and what have not”. He prophesied that Ramanujan would respond to such a stimulus and that “his name will become one of the greatest in the history of mathematics and the University and the city of Madras will be proud to have assisted in his passage from obscurity to fame.”