British soldiers who contracted it during the First World War were being successfully cured of amoebiasis around the time Ramanujan left England. Personality and spiritual life Ramanujan has been described as a person of a somewhat shy and quiet disposition, a dignified man with pleasant manners. He lived a simple life at Cambridge. Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes. He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." Hardy cites Ramanujan as remarking that all religions seemed equally true to him. Hardy further argued that Ramanujan's religious belief had been romanticised by Westerners and overstated—in reference to his belief, not practice—by Indian biographers. At the same time, he remarked on Ramanujan's strict vegetarianism. Similarly, in an interview with Frontline, Berndt said, "Many people falsely promulgate mystical powers to Ramanujan's mathematical thinking. It is not true. He has meticulously recorded every result in his three notebooks," further speculating that Ramanujan worked out intermediate results on slate that he could not afford the paper to record more permanently. Mathematical achievements In mathematics, there is a distinction between insight and formulating or working through a proof. Ramanujan proposed an abundance of formulae that could be investigated later in depth. G. H. Hardy said that Ramanujan's discoveries are unusually rich and that there is often more to them than initially meets the eye. As a byproduct of his work, new directions of research were opened up. Examples of the most intriguing of these formulae include infinite series for , one of which is given below: This result is based on the negative fundamental discriminant with class number . Further, and , which is related to the fact that This might be compared to Heegner numbers, which have class number 1 and yield similar formulae. Ramanujan's series for converges extraordinarily rapidly and forms the basis of some of the fastest algorithms currently used to calculate . Truncating the sum to the first term also gives the approximation for , which is correct to six decimal places; truncating it to the first two terms