Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of India’s greatest mathematical geniuses, was born on 22 Dec 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, and moved to Kumbakonam, where his father worked, when he was a year old. He did well in school and was an all-round scholar till he started to work on mathematics almost to the exclusion of all else.
In high school Ramanujan came across a mathematics book by G S Carr called Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics. which with its concise style allowed him to teach himself mathematics. Unfortunately, since it provided his only model of written mathematical arguments, it affected the way Ramanujan later wrote.
By 1904 Ramanujan had begun to undertake research and began to study the Bernoulli numbers, his own independent discovery. He was given a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam in 1904, but it was not renewed because he devoted all his time to mathematics and neglected other subjects. He was out of money and ran away to Vishakapatnam. He continued his mathematical work and at this time he worked on the hypergeometric series.
In 1906 Ramanujan entered Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras. He wanted to pass the First Arts examination to get into the University of Madras. But he passed only in mathematics, which meant no university. He continued to work on mathematics developing his own ideas without help and without any real idea of the current research topics.
After the publication of a brilliant research paper on Bernoulli numbers in 1911 in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society he gained recognition and began to be known in the Madras area as a mathematical genius. In 1912 E W Middlemast, Professor of Mathematics at the Presidency College in Madras, wrote in a job reference: “I can strongly recommend the applicant. He is a young man of quite exceptional capacity in mathematics and especially in work relating to numbers.”
The University of Madras gave Ramanujan a scholarship for two years and in 1914 G H Hardy brought him to Trinity College, Cambridge, where began an extraordinary collaboration. There were problems. Ramanujan was an orthodox Brahmin and a strict vegetarian. It was not long before he had health problems. Even in his first winter in England Ramanujan was ill and wrote in March 1915 that he had not been able to publish anything for five months.
In March 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research (the degree was called a PhD from 1920). He was allowed to enrol in June 1914 despite not having the proper qualifications.
Ramanujan fell seriously ill in 1917 and his doctors feared he would die. He did improve a little by September but spent most of his time in nursing homes.
In February 1918 Ramanujan was elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and in May his election to the Royal Society of London, proposed by an impressive list of mathematicians, was confirmed. In October he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, the fellowship to run for six years.
The honours bestowed on Ramanujan seemed to help his health improve a little and he renewed his efforts in mathematics. He returned to India in 1919 but his health deteriorated and despite medical treatment he died the following year.
Ramanujan worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series and functional equations of the zeta function. He independently discovered results arrived at by others on hypergeometric series. His work on partial sums and products of hypergeometric series has led to major development in the topic. Perhaps his most famous work was on the number p(n) of partitions of an integer n into summands.
A stamp was issued by the Indian Post Office to celebrate the 75th anniversary of his birth.