This sentence could be a reference to the genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. He famously taught himself mathematics in India. With little access to texts, his notation had evolved to suit his own thoughts and so was completely incomprehensible to the Western mathematicians to whom he sent his work. The series he sent summed to -1/12, and was noticed by mathematicians G.H. Hardy and Littlewood to be an important result in the context of the Riemann Zeta Landscape.
The result itself was as follows:
Zeta(-1) = 1 + 1/(2^-1) + 1/(3^-1) + 1/(4^-1)... Which Ramanajun calculated to be equal to -1/12. The dismissal he recieved from most western mathematicians was due to the fact that, as the strangeness of this node-title suggests, he wrote this out as:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12
Further messages or additional writeups in this node would be welcome. I'm not a professor of mathematics, which I would need to be to do this topic justice.