श्रीनिवास रामानुजन Srinivasa Ramanujan

श्रीनिवास रामानुजन Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode in 1887 and grew up in Kumbakonam. He taught himself higher mathematics from a book of formulas and failed his college exams. His 1913 letter to G. H. Hardy took him to Cambridge. With Hardy he found a formula for the number of partitions of a whole number. He died in 1920 at 32. His birthday is India’s National Mathematics Day.

Curated by Nikhil Sharma: a clerk in the Madras Port Trust who wrote to a Cambridge professor in 1913. Within five years he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and of Trinity. He left almost 3,900 results in his notebooks. Physicists still find his formulas inside black holes and string theory.

• ~3,900 Results: Recorded in his notebooks, mostly identities and equations
• 1729 Taxicab number: The smallest sum of two cubes in two different ways
• 600+ Lost notebook formulas: From his last year. Found at Trinity in 1976
• 32 Age at death: He died on 26 April 1920

The facts

Born

22 December 1887 in his grandmother’s house in Erode. He grew up in Kumbakonam (MacTutor History of Mathematics (St Andrews): Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan)

Family

Son of K. Srinivasa, a clerk in a silk merchant’s shop, and Komalatammal, who sang devotional songs. Married Janaki in 1909 (MacTutor: Ramanujan, Srinivasa (Dictionary of National Biography entry))

Schooling

Town High School, Kumbakonam. Government College, Kumbakonam and Pachaiyappa’s College, Madras. He did not complete a degree in India (MacTutor History of Mathematics (St Andrews): Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan)

Work

Clerk at the Madras Port Trust from 1 March 1912 (MacTutor History of Mathematics (St Andrews): Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan)

Cambridge

Trinity College from April 1914. BA by Research in March 1916 for work on highly composite numbers (ThePrint: Srinivasa Ramanujan, self-taught mathematician whose genius survives more than a century on (22 December 2020))

Honours

Fellow of the Royal Society (1918). First Indian Fellow of Trinity College (October 1918) (Wikipedia: Srinivasa Ramanujan)

Legacy

Three notebooks and a sheaf of loose pages known as the lost notebook. 22 December is National Mathematics Day in India (Britannica: Srinivasa Ramanujan)

Died

26 April 1920 at 32. MacTutor gives Kumbakonam and the DNB entry gives Madras (MacTutor History of Mathematics (St Andrews): Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan)

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