Person · mathematician · India
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Also known as Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ramanujan, S. Ramanujan, Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar
Kumbakonam-born mathematician (1887–1920) who taught himself number theory from G.S. Carr's A Synopsis of Pure Mathematics borrowed from the Government College library, worked as a shipping clerk at the Madras Port Trust while filling notebooks with results, and wrote in January 1913 to G.H. Hardy at Cambridge. Hardy brought him to Trinity College in 1914. Over the next five years he produced about 3,900 results, including the partition congruences, the mock theta functions, and the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic formula. He returned to India tubercular in 1919 and died at Kumbakonam in 1920 at thirty-two. His unpublished Lost Notebook of 1976 continues to generate mathematical research a century later.
- Date
- 1887–1920
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The famous Hardy-Ramanujan taxicab number 1729 — Hardy mentioned it was the number of the cab he had come in and that it seemed dull; Ramanujan replied it was the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways — is the single mathematical anecdote the public knows. Ramanujan's own claim that the goddess Namagiri whispered the formulas to him was taken by Hardy as a figure of speech and by Ramanujan as a straight description.
About the place
Placed at Kumbakonam, his home and where he died.
Connections (1)
- FromKumbeshwarar, Kumbakonam
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 at Erode but grew up at Kumbakonam in the Kaveri delta, where he attended Town High School and the Government College. The town's Sarangapani temple and the Mahamaham tank are the landscape of his childhood; his mother Komalatammal's tutelage in Namagiri Thayar devotion at the nearby Namakkal temple remained the religious reference point of his short life. He returned to Kumbakonam dying of tuberculosis in 1919 and died there in April 1920.