THE GREAT MATHEMATICIAN OF
INDIA
SHRINIVASA RAMANUJAN
• Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an
Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure
mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical
analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions,
including solutions to mathematical problems then considered
unsolvable.
SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN
FRS
• Born – 22 December 1887, Tamil Nadu, India
• Died – 26 April 1920(aged 32), tanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, India
• Education – Government Arts College Pachaiyappa’s College,Trinity
College, Cambridge (BA)
• Rewards – Fellow of the Royal Society (1918)
• Signature -
Early life
He was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil
Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras
Presidency (now Tamil Nadu, India) at his
maternal grandparent’s residence. His father
was K. Srinivasa Iyengar, an accounting clerk
for a clothing merchant, and his mother was
Komalatammal, a housewife and sang at a local
temple.
The family was of high caste and was very poor.
Srinivasa Ramanujan’s parents moved around a
lot, and so he attended a variety of different
elementary schools.
In November 1897, he passed his primary
examinations in English, Tamil, geography, and
arithmetic, and gained vest scores in the
district. He entered Town Higher Secondary
School in the same year and encountered
formal mathematics for the first time.
Discovery as a
Mathematician of
Genius
At the age of 11, he had taken the mathematics knowledge of two college students who were lodgers
at his home. Later, he lent a book written by S. L. Loney on advanced trigonometry. By the age of 13,
he had mastered it and discovered his theorems on his own.
At 14 years of age, he received merit certificates and academic awards that continued throughout his
school career. Also, he completed an exam in mathematics in half of the allotted time and showed
familiarity with geometry and infinite series.
In 1902, he showed how to solve cubic equations. He also developed his own methods.
At the age of 15, he obtained a copy of George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in
Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. It consists of thousands of theorems. He studied the contents of
the book in detail and went beyond and developed his own theorems and ideas. This book acts as a
key element in awakening his genius. It is said that he independently developed and investigated the
Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places.
He secured a scholarship in 1903 to the University of Madras but lost it in the following years due to
the negligence of all other studies in pursuit of mathematics. He met with the founder of the Indian
Mathematical Society, V Ramaswamy Aiyer in 1910 and began to gain recognition in Madras
mathematical circles and leading to his inclusion as a researcher at the University of Madras.
Marriage and Career in
Mathematics
In July 1909, he married Janakiammal. He became
ill and went to surgery around 1910. After his
successful surgery, he searched for a job. He also
tutored students at Presidency College in Madras
who were preparing for their Fellow of Arts exam.
In 1910, he met V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, who founded
the Indian Mathematical Society. He convinced him
and luck favours. And as a result, with the help of
Aiyer, his work had been published in the Journal of
the Indian Mathematical Society.
He got the job in 1912 as an accounting clerk with
the Madras Port Trust and his financial condition
improved.
His intelligence and genius slowly gained
recognition and he began a correspondence in
1913 with the British mathematician Godfrey H.
Hardy that led to a special scholarship from the
University of Madras and a grant from Trinity
Life in
England
He travelled to England in 1914, where Hardy
tutored him. He collaborated with him on some
research work. He brought his notebooks from
India which were filled with thousands of
identities, equations, and theorems that he
discovered for himself in the years 1903 to 1914.
Some were discovered by earlier
mathematicians; some through inexperience,
were mistaken, and many were entirely new.
He had very little formal training in mathematics.
He spent around 5 years in Cambridge
collaborating with Hardy and Littlewood and
published part of his findings there.
Major
Works
He worked in several areas including the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric
series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series, in
which he discovered a value for the sum of such series using a technique he invented and came
to be known as Ramanujan summation.
He also made several advances in England, mainly in the partition of numbers (the various ways
that a positive integer can be expressed as the sum of positive integers; e.g. 4 can be expressed
as 4, 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1).
His papers were published in English and European Journals. He was elected to the Royal Society
of London in 1918 and became the second Indian. He was also elected “for his investigation in
elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers.”
In October 1918, he was the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He is also known for Landau–Ramanujan constant, Mock theta functions, Ramanujan conjecture,
Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan–Soldner constant, Ramanujan theta function, Ramanujan’s sum,
Rogers–Ramanujan identities, Ramanujan’s master theorem, and Ramanujan–Sato series.
1729 is famous as Hardy-Ramanujan number and generalisation of this idea have generated the
notion of “Taxicab numbers”.
Illness and
Death
He contracted tuberculosis in
1917. His condition improved
so that he could return to
India in 1919. He died the
following year. He left behind
three notebooks and some
pages, also known as the
“lost notebook” that
contained various
unpublished results.
Mathematicians continued to
verify these results after his
death.
