I suppose Ramanujan doesn't seem important to the layperson, because his major contributions were both very advanced and difficult to explain -- compare Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, that no axiomatic system representing Robinson arithmetic can prove its own consistency: that one is much simpler than a result dealing with mock theta functions -- and they were also in pure mathematics rather than applied mathematics, and the main application of Ramanujan's work has been in some areas of quantum mechanics and string theory, which are themselves a bit beyond a layperson. The partition function does pop up in computing from time to time, though.
I've heard of a division of mathematicians into so-called "theory-builders" and "problem-solvers" -- Ramanujan and Hilbert are firmly in the first class, while Erdös, Wiles and Gödel fall into the second. Ramanujan was transformative because he changed the questions that were asked, as well as answering them.
If you look at pure mathematics, most in the field will agree that Ramanujan was a -- if not the -- preeminent mathematician of the 20th century. In applied mathematics, that title probably goes to John von Neumann.
I've heard of a division of mathematicians into so-called "theory-builders" and "problem-solvers" -- Ramanujan and Hilbert are firmly in the first class, while Erdös, Wiles and Gödel fall into the second. Ramanujan was transformative because he changed the questions that were asked, as well as answering them.
If you look at pure mathematics, most in the field will agree that Ramanujan was a -- if not the -- preeminent mathematician of the 20th century. In applied mathematics, that title probably goes to John von Neumann.