Biography of scientist srinivasa ramanujan biography

This month marks the centenary of the death of one of the most remarkable mathematicians of the 20th century. The enigmatic Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was perhaps one of the most original mathematicians of all time. In a career that only lasted around ten years, he produced hundreds of highly innovative results in several areas of pure mathematics, particularly number theory and analysis. After his death, his notebooks and unpublished results inspired decades of research by succeeding mathematicians, the impact of which is still being felt in mathematics today. What follows is based in large part on the work of these scholars, particularly G.H. Hardy [1,2], George Andrews [3], Bruce Berndt [3–5] and Ramanujan’s biographer, Robert Kanigel [6].

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born to a modest Brahmin family on 22 December 1887 in the town of Erode in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Due to his father’s heavy work schedule, the boy formed a close relationship with his mother, and it was from her that he acquired his religious beliefs and adherence to specific customs, particularly his strict vegetarianism. Performing well at primary school, he passed exams in English, Tamil, geography and arithmetic at the age of 10 with the best scores in his school district. After beginning secondary level mathematics, by his early teens he was investigating and discovering his own independent results. For example, by the age of 15, having been taught the method for solving cubic equations, he had created his own algorithm to solve the quartic.

The biggest influence on his mathematical development appears to have been his acquisition, at the age of 16, of a copy of A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics by a certain G.S. Carr [7]. This was a large compendium of hundreds of mathematical formulae and theorems, listed thematically with little to no commentary or mo

Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 in Erode, a minor city in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu) in South India. His father was a clerk in a fabric store. The family was Brahmin and Ramanujan's maternal grandfather was a minor official in a local court. Thus the family was poor but socially respectable. Ramanujan was born in that grandfather's house in Erode. Soon after his birth his mother and father moved with him to a house in the town of Kumbakonam and Ramanujan grew up there.

The family name Ramanujan means person who contains a particle of the god Rama. The personal name Srinivasa roughly means Prosperous, more literally one who abides in wealth.

Ramanujan's family sometimes took in student boarders and it was through these that Ramanujan was first introduced to formal mathematics. One of the boarders lent him a trigonometry text when he was twelve and Ramanujan by himself mastered it within a year.

When Ramanujan was sixteen and still in high school an elderly friend who knew of his precocious mathematical talent gave him George Carr's Synopsis of elementary results in pure and applied mathematics. This two-volume encyclopedic tome contained six thousand theorems on all fields of mathematics. As Ramanujan read and worked his way through these theorems he discovered that he could derive results that were not in Carr. This was the beginnings of Ramanujan's mathematical productions and set the tone for his mathematical career.

Indian mathematician (1887–1920)

"Ramanujan" redirects here. For other uses, see Ramanujan (disambiguation).

In this Indian name, the name Srinivasa is a patronymic, and the person should be referred to by the given name, Ramanujan.

Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. Often regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, 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.

Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation. According to Hans Eysenck, "he tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a mail correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognising Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician, was born Dec. 22, 1887.  Born into a Brahmin family with little means, living south of Madras in southern India, Ramanujan did well enough in school, until he discovered mathematics, which soon captured all his attention.  He began to neglect all other subjects except math, to the detriment of his schooling, where he soon lost scholarships, as he failed all exams except mathematical ones.  His interest lay in number theory and equations, and such topics as infinite series and prime numbers.  Despite his setbacks at school, he received encouragement from teachers and early employers, for he was clearly a mathematical genius.

His mother arranged a marriage for him in 1909; his bride was only 10 years old and did not move in with Ramanujan until later.  Some of his patrons found him a job in 1912 as a clerk at the Port of Madras, where he could do the required accounting work quickly and had time for his mathematical pursuits.  He had discovered a handbook by G.S. Carr, A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics: Containing Propositions, Formula, and Methods of Analysis (1886), which contained thousands of equations and formulae, mostly without proofs, intended by school use.  Ramanujan worked through the entire 900-page book methodically, and he followed Carr's model in much of his own work, coming up with hundreds of unusual equations, which he seldom bothered to prove (nearly all turned out later to be true). We happen to have a well-used copy of Carr’s Synopsis, the original 1886 edition used by Ramanujan, in our closed stacks, which I feared to leaf through, as the years have not been kind to it (second im