SRINIVASA RAMANAUJAN
∞THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY∞
The world will soon remember the renowned Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan once again, as a biopic on his life, named The Man Who Knew Infinity, was released last this April. Ramanujan, who lived a short but very productive life, continues to be an inspiration for mathematicians across the world, and his work has inspired a lot of research over the years.
10 Unknown facts about him :
1. He was poor
- His father worked as a clerk with a cloth merchant and his mother was a homemaker who also used to sing at a local temple.
- Ramanujan continued his mathematical work, without employment and living in the poorest circumstances. After marrying in 1909 he began a search for permanent employment that culminated in an interview with a government official, Ramachandra Rao. Impressed by Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess, Rao supported his research for a time, but Ramanujan, unwilling to exist on charity, obtained a clerical post with the Madras Port Trust.
2. He is recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians of his time, but Srinivasa Ramanujan had almost no formal training in math.
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| Srinivasa Ramanujan (centre) with other scientists at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. |
- Many of his mathematical discoveries were based on pure intuition – but most of them were later proved to be true.
- When he was 15 years old, he obtained a copy of George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. (1880–86). This collection of thousands of theorems, many presented with only the briefest of proofs and with no material newer than 1860, aroused his genius. Having verified the results in Carr’s book, Ramanujan went beyond it, developing his own theorems and ideas. In 1903 he secured a scholarship to the University of Madras but lost it the following year because he neglected all other studies in pursuit of mathematics.
3. He was the second Indian to be inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is a Fellowship of some of the world’s most eminent scientists.
- He joined the fellowship in 1918 at the age of 31, as one of youngest fellows in the history of the society.
4. A follwer of his family goddess Mahalakshmi,Ramanujan credited her for his abilities.
- He once said, “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.”
5. He compiled 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations), before he lost his life at the age of 32. His infinite series for pi was one of his most celebrated findings.
- He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series. On the other hand, he knew nothing of doubly periodic functions, the classical theory of quadratic forms, or Cauchy’s theorem, and he had only the most nebulous idea of what constitutes a mathematical proof. Though brilliant, many of his theorems on the theory of prime numbers were wrong.
6. His birth anniversary, December 22, is celebrated as the National Mathematics Day every year.
7. According to reports, Ramanujan used to jot down his ideas in notebooks, in green ink.
- One of the notebooks, known as the ‘lost notebook’, was discovered in the Trinity College library by mathematician George Andrews in 1976, and was later published as a book.
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