Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan was a great mathematics genius born in Erode, a small-town in Tamil Nadu on December 22, 1887.
All through his life, Ramanujan was fascinated with numbers. Stories
abound of his ability to astound his teachers with mathematical feats such
as multiplying large numbers in his head. He would sometimes stay up all
night tackling difficult mathematical problems, refusing to sleep until he
had solved them.
However, his love of mathematics was so intense that his other subjects
suffered. In fact, although he graduated from high school early, his
progress at university was hindered by his weakness in English. This
eventually led to the loss of a scholarship upon which he depended.
Ramanujan came from a poor Brahmin family and he wanted to continue his
pursuit of mathematics. He had already begun to make important
discoveries, and they flowed out of him at a prolific rate. He ended up
running away to Madras in order to look for opportunities to continue his
studies. In Madras, through the intervention of some contacts he had made,
he managed to get a job as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust. There he
proceeded to fill notebooks with his ideas. These notebooks have since
been published, and it is obvious that Ramanujan got over his weakness in
English, as the notebooks show impeccable English as well as some
unusual mathematics.
Eventually, Ramanujan moved on to the University of Madras with a research
studentship. It was here that he began a correspondence with G.H. Hardy at
the University of Cambridge that would eventually lead to his leaving
India for Cambridge.
The four years that Ramanujan spent in England were to be his most
fruitful. In his collaborations with Professor Hardy, he constantly amazed his
mentor with his insights. Ramanujan independently discovered results of Gauss, Kummer and others on hypergeometric series. Ramanujan's own work on partial sums and products of hypergeometric series have led to major development in the topic.
However, on a personal level, Ramanujan refused
to give up his orthodox Hindu lifestyle. He continued to cook his own food and
subsist on a purely vegetarian diet. He would also walk barefoot on cold
floors. As a result, he was often in hospital, unable to endure the
demands of the English climate.
One favorite story about Ramanujan revolves around a visit that Hardy paid
to him in hospital. Hardy and Ramanujan had a habit of discussing the
properties of different numbers. On this particular visit, Hardy commented
to Ramanujan that the number of the taxi that he had just arrived in was
1729 -- a very uninteresting number. Ramanujan quickly replied that it was
in fact a very interesting number as it was the smallest number that could
be represented as the sum of two cubes in two ways:
1729 = 103 + 93
and
1729 = 123 + 13
Ramanujan received many honors in England. He was elected as a fellow of
Trinity College, and then became the first Indian elected to the Royal
Society of Mathematicians. But his health continued to deteriorate, and he
decided to return to India.
The damage his health had suffered in England was permanent, and he was
diagnosed with tuberculosis. He died in India a year after he returned
from England. The poignant truth of the old saying, "those whom the gods love die young", was tragically borne out by Srinivasa Ramanujan when he died on April 26, 1920. He was only 32. But, the young genius had left behind a wealth of mathematical
information in his notebooks, which have since become very famous. Most of
what is contained in his notebooks are discoveries with no proofs. Given
Ramanujan's genius, one can assume that these are true, but modern
mathematicians are still wading through his work, trying to prove some of
his theorems.
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