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Srinivasa Ramujan

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in India and showed a natural talent for mathematics from a young age. He made many contributions to mathematics on his own with little formal training. In 1913, he wrote to G. H. Hardy and was recognized for his mathematical genius, leading to opportunities to further his work and education in England. However, Ramanujan struggled with illness and returned to India in poor health in 1919.

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20 views2 pages

Srinivasa Ramujan

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in India and showed a natural talent for mathematics from a young age. He made many contributions to mathematics on his own with little formal training. In 1913, he wrote to G. H. Hardy and was recognized for his mathematical genius, leading to opportunities to further his work and education in England. However, Ramanujan struggled with illness and returned to India in poor health in 1919.

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Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)

NC Ramanujan was born in Erode, a


small village in Tamil Nadu on 22 December 1887. When he was a
year old his family moved to the town of Kumbakonam, where his
father worked as a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop. When he was
nearly five years old, Ramanujan enrolled in the primary school. In
1898 he joined the Town High School in Kumbakonam. At the Town
High School, Ramanujan did well in all subjects and proved himself
an able all round scholar. It was here that he came across the book
Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics by G. S. Carr.
Influenced by the book, he began working on mathematics on his
own, summing geometric and arithmetic series. He was given a
scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam. However,
his scholarship was not renewed because Ramanujan neglected all
subjects other than mathematics. In 1905 he appeared for the First
Arts examination which would have allowed him to be admitted to
the University of Madras. Again, he failed in all subjects other than
mathematics, a performance he repeated in 1906 and 1907 too. In
the following years he worked on mathematics, with only Carr’s book
as a guide, noting his results in what would become the famous
Notebooks. He got married in 1909 and started looking for a job. His
search took him to many influential people, among them
Ramachandra Rao, one of the founding members of the Indian
Mathematical Society. For a year he was supported by Ramachandra
Rao who gave him Rs. 25 per month. He started posing and solving
problems in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. His
research paper on Bernoulli numbers, in 1911, brought him
recognition and he became well known in Chennai as a mathematical
genius. In 1912, with Ramachandra Rao’s help, he secured the post
of clerk in the accounts section of the Madras Port Trust. He
continued to pursue mathematics and in 1913 he wrote to G. H.
Hardy in Cambridge, enclosing a long list of his own theorems. Hardy
immediately recognized Ramanujan’s mathematical ability. On the
basis of Hardy’s letters, Ramanujan was given a scholarship by the
University of Madras in 1913. In 1914, Hardy arranged for him to go
to Trinity College, Cambridge. Ramanujan’s work with Hardy
produced important results right from the beginning. In 1916
Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by
Research. In 1918, he was elected a Fellow of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, all in the same year! However,
from 1917 onwards he was seriously ill and mostly bedridden. In
1919 he returned to India, in very poor health. Ramanujan made
outstanding contributions to analytical number theory, elliptic
functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. His published and
unpublished works have kept some of the best mathematical brains
in the world busy to this day.

“An equation means nothing to me unless it


expresses a thought of God”.

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