Ramunajan - A legend of Indian mathematics
Sunday, May 19, 2013
The Indian mathematical genius Srinivas Ramanujan was born 22 December,1887 which is 125 years ago. He was born at Erode in the Presidency of Madras (presently state of Tamilnadu) in a Brahmin family.
His achievements are acclaimed worldwide and one perfect example for that is the Hardy - Ramanujan number ‘1729’ which is considered as a milestone in history of mathematics. Essentially self-taught with very limited formal education, Ramanujan was driven by his love for mathematics.
He studied all by himself some graduate level maths books and derived certain mathematical results. He sent these to the renowned Cambridge university mathematician G H Hardy. Hardy initially thought that the letter came from some crank, one of many who sent their work to him for comments, but a closer inspection along with his fellow mathematician, Littlewood convinced him that he was dealing with an extraordinary intellect. He followed up with Ramanujan inviting him to Cambridge where they did considerable work on the number theory. On many occasions Ramanujan simply wrote down the answer to difficult question which Hardy later followed up and derived with formal mathematical methods. Yet he couldn’t understand how Ramanujan got to the answer and this continued to baffle mathematicians who followed Hardy in their derivation of all the results obtained by this young formally little trained yet extraordinary genius person. Unfortunately, Ramanujan did not live long.
Ramanujan died of illness, malnutrition, and possibly liver infection in 1920 at the age of 32. His death was a huge loss to the world of math.Ramanujan’s name inspires many Indian youngsters who aspire to become future mathematicians. In recognition of his contribution to mathematics, the Government of India declared that Ramanujan's birthday (22 December) should be celebrated every year as National Mathematics Day, and also declared 2012 the National Mathematics Year.
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