Srinivasa Ramanujan Biography: Know Srinivasa Ramanujan Birthday, Speech, Facts and History

Srinivasa Ramanujan Biography:  Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on (December 22, 1887, in Erode town, Tamil Nadu India). And he was an Indian greatest mathematician given contributions to number theory, functions, and infinite series.

National Mathematics Day is observed on 22 December annually to commemorate the birth anniversary of the great Indian Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. 

In 2012, Dr. Manmohan Singh, then Prime Minister, declared December 22 as National Mathematics Day. Today is the 134th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan. On this day, let us have a look at his childhood, early life, education, contributions and major works, awards and achievements, etc.

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Key Facts

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Childhood, and Early Life

He was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu, India) at his maternal grandparent's residence. His father was K. Srinivasa Iyengar, an accounting clerk for a clothing merchant, and his mother was Komalatammal, a housewife and sang at a local temple. 

The family was of high caste and was very poor. Srinivasa Ramanujan's parents moved around a lot, and so he attended a variety of different elementary schools. 

In November 1897, he passed his primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography, and arithmetic, and gained vest scores in the district. He entered Town Higher Secondary School in the same year and encountered formal mathematics for the first time.

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Discovery as a Mathematician of Genius

At the age of 11, he had taken the mathematics knowledge of two college students who were lodgers at his home. Later, he lent a book written by S. L. Loney on advanced trigonometry. By the age of 13, he had mastered it and discovered his theorems on his own. 

At 14 years of age, he received merit certificates and academic awards that continued all through his school career. Also, he completed an exam in mathematics in half of the allotted time and showed familiarity with geometry and infinite series. 

In 1902, he showed how to solve cubic equations. He also developed his own methods.

At the age of 15, he obtained a copy of George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. It consists of thousands of theorems. He studied the contents of the book in detail and went beyond and developed his own theorems and ideas. This book acts as a key element in awakening his genius. It is said that he independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places.

He secured a scholarship in 1903 to the University of Madras but lost it in the following years due to the negligence of all other studies in pursuit of mathematics. He met with the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, V Ramaswamy Aiyer in 1910 and began to gain recognition in Madras mathematical circles and leading to his inclusion as a researcher at the University of Madras.

READ| 9 Interesting Facts about Genius Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Marriage and Career in Mathematics

In July 1909, he married Janakiammal. He became ill and went to surgery around 1910. After his successful surgery, he searched for a job. He also tutored students at Presidency College in Madras who were preparing for their Fellow of Arts exam. In 1910, he met V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, who founded the Indian Mathematical Society. He convinced him and luck favours. And as a result, with the help of Aiyer, his work had been published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. 

He got the job in 1912 as an accounting clerk with the Madras Port Trust and his financial condition improved.

His intelligence and genius slowly gained recognition and he began a correspondence in 1913 with the British mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy that led to a special scholarship from the University of Madras and a grant from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Life in England

He travelled to England in 1914, where Hardy tutored him. He collaborated with him on some research work. He brought his notebooks from India which were filled with thousands of identities, equations, and theorems that he discovered for himself in the years 1903 to 1914. Some were discovered by earlier mathematicians; some through inexperience, were mistaken, and many were entirely new.

He had very little formal training in mathematics. He spent around 5 years in Cambridge collaborating with Hardy and Littlewood and published part of his findings there. 

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Major Works

He worked in several areas including the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series, in which he discovered a value for the sum of such series using a technique he invented and came to be known as Ramanujan summation.

He also made several advances in England, mainly in the partition of numbers (the various 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 papers were published in English and European Journals. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1918 and became the second Indian. He was also elected "for his investigation in elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers."

In October 1918, he was the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

He is also known for Landau–Ramanujan constant, Mock theta functions, Ramanujan conjecture, Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan–Soldner constant, Ramanujan theta function, Ramanujan's sum, Rogers–Ramanujan identities, Ramanujan's master theorem, and Ramanujan–Sato series. 

1729 is famous as Hardy-Ramanujan number and generalisation of this idea have generated the notion of "Taxicab numbers".

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Illness and Death

He contracted tuberculosis in 1917. His condition improved so that he could return to India in 1919. He died the following year. He left behind three notebooks and some pages, also known as the "lost notebook" that contained various unpublished results. Mathematicians continued to verify these results after his death.

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