facts about ramanujan

Let me share a few information about the Math genius who stated the quote “an equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.

 

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India.

Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu, India), at the residence of his maternal grandparents. His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa, originally from Thanjavur district, worked as a clerk in a sari shop. His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and sang at a local temple. The family home is now a museum.

Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.

Recognizing Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy and Littlewood arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced ground-breaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before", and some recently proven but highly advanced results.

During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae, and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research.

 

In popular culture

The Man Who Loved Numbers is a 1988 PBS NOVA documentary about Ramanujan. The Man Who Knew Infinity is a 2015 British biographical drama film about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. A Disappearing Number is a British stage production, that explores the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan.

Ramanujan was plagued by health problems throughout his life. In 1919, he returned to Kumbakonam, Madras Presidency, and in 1920 he died at the age of 32.

Ramanujan has been described as a person of a somewhat shy and quiet disposition, a dignified man with pleasant manners. He lived a simple life at Cambridge. He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."