This man is most amazing. Look at his background which did not aid him any way to take the course he did. With hardly any input he came out with mathematical theorems and propositions that even top mathematicians found difficult to understand. And just like Sankaracharya he too died at the age of 32. Both men were geniuses in their own fields. Who knows what he would have achieved had he lived longer. One of my acquaintances mentioned his name to me today and I could not resist reading more about him and I thank Wikipedia for the information which I had abridged and rewritten.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born at Erode Tamilnadu in 1887. His father Srinivasa Iyengar worked as a clerk in a saree shop and his mother was a housewife and also sang in the local temple in the town of Kumbakonam. He moved with his mother to her parents house at Kanchipuram later. After that the family moved back to Kumbakonam and from there again to Madras. Ramanujan did not like the school in Madras. And he tried avoiding it. In 6 months he was back in Kumbakonam. In 1897 at the age of 10 Ramanujan entered the town higher secondary school where he learnt formal mathematics for the first time.
From that time onwards Ramanujans mathematical genius flowered. By the age of 11 he completely learnt everything in mathematics from the two students who were lodgers at his home. By the age of 13 he completely mastered the advanced trigonometry of S.L.Loney and also discovered sophisticated theorems on his own. He completed the mathematical examinations in half the allotted time for the examinations. Ramanujan was solving cubic equations when he was just 15 years old and went on to solve the quartic equations.
When Ramanujan was just 16 he borrowed a copy of the book on mathematics by G.S.Carr. This book is generally acknowledged as the key element in awakening the genius of Ramanujan. Next year when he was just 17 he had independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli Numbers and calculated the Euler Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places. Ramanujan passed out from the school in 1904 when he was 17 years old. He won a scholarship for his brilliance in school for studying at Govt. Arts College, Kumbakonam. Ramanujan was so interested on mathematics that he ignored all other subjects and failed in most of them.
In 1905 Ramanujan ran away from home towards Visakhapatnam and stayed at Rajahmundry for a month’s time. He then went back to Madras and enrolled at Pachiyappas college. He again excelled in mathematics but failed in other subjects for 2 consecutive years. He left the college without a degree and pursued an independent research on mathematics. At this time, he lived in extreme poverty and was on the brink of starvation.
In 1909 Ramanujan was married to a 10 year old girl Janakiammal. After marriage he developed a serious swelling of the testicles that could be easily corrected by surgery but neither he nor his family had the money required for the operation. Luckily for him a doctor volunteered to do the operation for free. After the surgery Ramanujan went around Madras door to door to obtain a clerical position. He tutored some students who were giving their FA exam in the Presidency College for living.
In 1910 Ramanujan met Deputy Collector V.Ramaswamy Iyer seeking a job in the revenue department. This man had founded the Indian Mathematical society. Iyer was struck by the value of the genius of Ramanujan and did not want to smother his talent by giving him a job. Instead he gave him a letter of introduction to his mathematician friends in Madras. The friends referred him to R.Ramachandra Rao the Collector of Nellore and the secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society. Ramachandra rao was impressed by the research but doubted if the work was actually done by Ramanujan himself. Ramanujan’s friend persuaded Ramachandra Rao who gave another audience to Ramanujan. Here Rmanujan discussed with Rao his various mathematical theories which converted Rao into believing the genius of Ramanujan. Rao then granted financial assistance to Ramanujan to take care of his daily needs while he continued his mathematical research.
Ramanujan first had his work published in the Indian Mathematical Journal and then continued to write in the journal. He then applied and got selected as a Grade III clerk in the Madras port trust at a salary of Rs 30 per month.
With the help of friends Ramanujan drafted letters to leading mathematicians at Cambridge University. The first two professors to whom the letters were sent returned the papers without any comment. Ramanujan then wrote to G.H.Hardy who initially suspected that it might be a fraud. But later he commented that he had never seen anything like them before. He thought that to invent such theorems is impossibility and therefore Ramanujan must be genuine. Hardy asked a colleague to look after the papers who was amazed at the mathematical genius of Ramanujan. After discussing the papers with his colleague Hardy concluded that Ramanujan is a man of exceptional originality and power.
Hardy invited Ramanujan to Cambridge but the latter refused saying that it is against his upbringing to leave the country and go to a foreign land over the sea. Another associate of Hardy, a mathematics Lecturer from Trinity College Cambridge examined Ramanujans work and called it amazing and again invited him to spend some time at Cambridge. As a result of this endorsement Ramanujan got a research scholarship of Rs 75 per month from the Board of the Madras University.
Finally Ramanujan left for England in 1914. Ramanujan worked in collaboration with Hardy and his colleague Littlewood for 5 years. Ramanujan was awarded a PhD.(then called BA) in 1916 for his work on highly composite numbers. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal society in 1918 at the age of 31 and was one of the youngest fellows of the Royal Society. Then in 1918 again he became the first India to get elected as the fellow of the Trinity College, Cambridge.
Ramanujans health worsened in England and he returned back to Kumbakonam in 1919 and died in the same year at the age of 32.
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