125th Birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan

QualityPoint Blogs 22 Dec 2012

On December 22, 2012, Google India celebrates the 125th Birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan with a Doodle.It also marks the National Mathematics Day.

Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu.

At the of five Ramanujan went to primary school in Kumbakonam. In 1898 at age 10, he entered the Town High School in Kumbakonam. At the age of eleven he was lent books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney by two lodgers at his home who studied at the Government college. He mastered them by the age of thirteen.

He was given a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam which he entered in 1904. But he neglected his other subjects at the cost of mathematics and failed in college examination. He dropped out of the college.

In 1906 Ramanujan went to Madras where he entered Pachaiyappa’s College.

On 14 July 1909 Ramanujan marry a ten year old girl S Janaki Ammal. During this period Ramanujan had his first paper published, a 17-page work on Bernoulli numbers that appeared in 1911 in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. In 191,1 Ramanujan approached the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society for advice on a job. He got the job of clerk at the Madras Port Trust with the help of Indian mathematician Ramachandra Rao.

University of Madras gave Ramanujan a scholarship in May 1913 for two years and, in 1914, Hardy brought Ramanujan to Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin an extraordinary collaboration. Right from the start Ramanujan’s collaboration with Hardy led to important results. In a joint paper with Hardy, Ramanujan gave an asymptotic formula for p(n). It had the remarkable property that it appeared to give the correct value of p(n), and this was later proved by Rademacher.

Ramanujan fell seriously ill in 1917 and his doctors feared that he would die. He did improve a little by September but spent most of his time in various nursing homes. On February 18, 1918 Ramanujan was elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and later he was also elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. By the end of November 1918 Ramanujan’s health had greatly improved.

Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February 1919 arriving on 13 March. However his health was very poor and, despite medical treatment, he died on April 6, 1920.

On the 125th anniversary of his birth, India declared the birthday of Ramanujan, December 22, as ‘National Mathematics Day.’ The declaration was made by Dr. Manmohan Singh in Chennai on December 26, 2011.Dr Manmohan Singh also declared that the year 2012 would be celebrated as the National Mathematics Year.

An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.
- Srinivasa Ramanujan