[BITList] Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)

[John Feltham]

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)




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.







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