Happy Birthday to Sir Srinivasa Ramanujan, The Great Indian Mathematician of all Time.

The Great Indian Mathematician Sir Srinivasa Ramanujan, who studied number theory, was an expert in partition and modular functions, and created summation formulas, would turn 136 today. On December 22, 1887, Sir Ramanujan was born in Erode, a city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, near the banks of the Cauvery River. When Sir was 10 years old, he started attending a local high school, but the college students who lodged at his parents' house taught him more about mathematics.

The Man Who Knew Infinity author Robert Kanigel, who was Sir Ramanujan's biographer, claims that the young mathematician was greatly impacted by the two borrowed books: Sir George Shoobridge Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics and Sir S.L. Loney’s Plane Trigonometry. Sir Ramanujan was motivated to create his own proofs for thousands of theorems mentioned by Sir Carr's in their books and research work, which is a collection of 5000 mathematical formulas. At the age of seventeen, Sir Ramanujan had developed a new class of numbers and calculated Euler's constant to fifteen decimal places. According to a contemporary, "we, including his teachers, rarely understood him," even if his peers "stood in respectful awe of him".

 

Similar to Sir Albert Einstein, Sir Srinivasa Ramanujan had trouble in school and even could not pass his high school examinations due to concentration issues. The 22-year-old Erode native went to Madras in 1909, where he worked as a clerk in the Accountant General's Office. Indian mathematician Ramachandra Rao, who assisted Sir Ramanujan in getting the clerkship, pushed the young man to publish articles and look for wider recognition for his efforts. The Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society published a 17-page paper by Sir Ramanujan regarding Bernoulli numbers in 1911. The young mathematician sent a 10-page letter including more than 120 declarations of theorems on number theory, improper integrals, infinite series, and continuing fractions two years later. Sir G.H. Hardy, a mathematician from Cambridge who had previously ignored correspondence from Sir Ramanujan, forwarded this most recent message to his university colleague Sir J.E. Littlewood. As per Hardy, the English mathematicians arrived at the conclusion that the discoveries of Sir Ramanujan "must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them."

With Sir Hardy's assistance, Sir Ramanujan was appointed as a research scholar at the University of Madras, a post that doubled the salary of his clerk and involved no more labor beyond submitting quarterly reports. After boarding a steamer in March 1914 and arriving at Cambridge University, Sir Ramanujan and Sir G.H. Hardy embarked on a five-year cooperation. The researchers examined the partition function and its asymptotic together, as well as the characteristics of extremely composite numbers. Additionally, they determined that the Hardy-Ramanujan number (1729) is the smallest integer that can be expressed in two different ways as the sum of two positive cubes. Major contributions to the field of mathematics by Sir Ramanujan individually included work on gamma functions, modular forms, divergent series, hypergeometric series, and mock theta functions. Additionally, he created closed-form formulas for continuing fractions that are not simple (Sir Ramanujan's continued fractions), and defined a mathematical concept known as the Ramanujan prime.

Sir Srinivasa Ramanujan received an honorary bachelor's degree from Cambridge University in 1916, and was later appointed a Fellow of Trinity and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Despite his professional accomplishments, Sir Ramanujan suffered from poor health and was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis and amoebiasis, a parasitic infection of the liver. A vegetarian, he also suffered from a severe vitamin deficiency that may have been due to the shortage of fresh fruits and vegetables in wartime England. Sir Srinivasa Ramanujan died on April 26, 1920 at the age of 33. Today, his home state of Tamil Nadu celebrates his birthday, December 22, to memorialize both the man and his achievements.

Sir G. H. Hardy liked to rank mathematicians on a scale of 1 to 100, and he gave himself 25, Sir Littlewood 30, Sir David Hilbert 80, and Sir Ramanujan 100, which shows just how great Sir Ramanujan was.