Scientist born in December

Mathematics is one of the most crucial subjects that has transformed the face of our world.

It is used to describe so many fundamental and complex concepts.

Using it, we do daily tasks while bigger tasks are also done by using it.

Mathematics has had a profound impact on our Indian mathematicians and scientists.

One of these people has been Srinivasa Ramanujan.

He was an Indian mathematician that established many important 20th century concepts in mathematics and more.

Childhood and education

Srinivasa Ramanujan is regarded as one of the most influential Indian mathematicians of all time.

He was born on December 22, 1887, in Erode, India.

He is known for his contributions to the theory of numbers that include pioneering discoveries of the properties of the partition function.

His journey with mathematics started at a very young age.

At the ripe age of 15, he had obtained a copy of George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary

Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. (1880–86).

This book was a collection of thousands of theorems.

Many of these theorems presented were only marked by very brief proofs and all the material in it was older than 1860.

This arouses his genius.

He verified the results in the book.

Yet, our mathematician did not stop there.

He went further to develop his theorems and ideas

He ended up securing a scholarship at the University of Madras in 1903.

However, he lost it the following year because he neglected all other studies in pursuit of mathematics.

Employment and stability

He religiously continued his work, without employment and living in the poorest circumstances.

He got married in the year 1909 after which he began a search for permanent employment.

This led to him getting interviewed by a government official, Ramachandra Rao.

Rao was thoroughly impressed by Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess.

Hence, Rao ended up supporting his research for a while.

Unwilling to work on charity, Ramanujan took up a clerical post with the Madras Port Trust.

Ramanujan published his first papers in the year 1991 in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

His genius started to shine out bright when he slowly started gaining recognition and fame.

This happened in the year 1913 when he began a correspondence with the British mathematician G. H. Hardy.

This led to a special scholarship from the University of Madras and a Cambridge grant from Trinity College.

Overcoming his religious objections, Ramanujan traveled to England in 1914.

When he traveled to England, Hardy tutored him and collaborated with him in some research.

The deep knowledge of mathematics

His knowledge in mathematics, which was almost all worked out by Ramanujan himself, was truly astounding and impressive.

Despite being almost completely unaware of modern developments in mathematics, his mastery of continued fractions was unequaled by any living mathematician.

Some of the places that Ramanujan worked on were the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his theory of divergent series.

In his theory of divergent series, he found a value for the sum of such series using a technique he invented that came to be called Ramanujan summation.

When he traveled to England, he made even greater strides in his research and work.

This was very evident in the partition of numbers (the number of ways that a positive integer can be expressed as the sum of positive integers; e.g., 4 can be expressed as 4, 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1).

His work was so incredible that it would commonly get published in English and European journals. He was elected to the Royal Society of London.

Ramanujan Machine

Humans enter an issue into most computer systems and expect the algorithm to solve it.

It's the other way around with the Ramanujan Machine.

According to the method, if you provide the method a constant, such as pi, it will generate an equation with an infinite series whose value, according to the method, is exactly pi.

Now it's up to humans to establish that the proposed equation is valid.

S.Ramanujan made this machine that revolutionized our understanding of modern mathematics and more.

Legacy

Unfortunately in the year 1917, the great mathematician ended up contracting tuberculosis.

However, his condition was enough for him to return to his motherland.

He died the consequent year.

Ramanujan left behind three notebooks and a sheaf of pages (also called the “lost notebook”) containing many unpublished results that mathematicians continued to verify long after his death.