Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician which short life given below.
Birth: Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras Presidency which present name Tamil Nadu, at the residence of his maternal grandparents.
Introduce of his family: His father, K. Srinivasa Iyengar, worked as a clerk in a sari shop and hailed from Thanjavur district. His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and also sang at a local temple.They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam. The family home is now a museum. When Ramanujan was a year and a half old, his mother gave birth to a son, Sadagopan, who died less than three months later. In December 1889, Ramanujan contracted smallpox, but unlike the thousands in the Thanjavur district who died of the disease that year, he recovered. He motivated with his mother to her parents’ house in Kanchipuram, near Madras which present name Chennai. His mother gave birth to two more children, in 1891 and 1894, but both died in childhood.
Pox and recovered: Ramanujan contracted smallpox in 1889 but improved from the potentially critical disease. While a young child, he spent substantial time in his motherly grandparents’ home.
Study and personal achievement
On 1 October 1892, Ramanujan was enrolled at the local school. By age of 10, in 1897, November, he passed his primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography and arithmetic with the best scores in the district.After passing out of Kangayan Primary School, he enrolled at Town Higher Secondary School in 1897.
By age 11, he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who were lodgers at his home. He was later lent a book by S. L. Loney on advanced trigonometry.By the age of 13 while discovering sophisticated theorems on his own.
By 14, he was receiving merit certificates and academic awards that continued throughout his school career, and he assisted the school in the logistics of assigning its 1200 students.
Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902; he developed his own method to solve the quartic.
In 1903, he got his hands on a book called ‘A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics’ by G.S. Carr which was a collection of 5000 theorems. He was thoroughly enthralled by the book and spent months studying it in detail. This book is credited to have awakened the mathematical genius in him.
By the age 17, he had independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and had calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places. He was now no longer interested in any other subject, and totally immersed himself in the study of mathematics only.
When he graduated from Town Higher Secondary School in 1904, Ramanujan was awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school’s headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. Iyer introduced Ramanujan as an outstanding student who deserved scores higher than the maximum.
He has gone to the Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, on scholarship. On the other hand, he was so worried with mathematics that he could not focus on any other subject, and unsuccessful in most of them. Owing to this, his scholarship was cancelld.
He later enrolled at Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras where again he conquered in mathematics, but accomplished poorly in other subjects. He failed to clear his Fellow of Arts exam in December 1906 and again a year later. Then he left college without a degree and sustained to pursue self-governing research in mathematics.
He was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, as one of the youngest Fellows in the history of the Royal Society. He was nominated “for his exploration in Elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers.” The same year, he was also nominated a Fellow of Trinity College—the first Indian to be so honored.
He was married to a ten-year-old girl named Janakiammal in July 1909 when he was in his early 20s. The marriage was arranged by his mother. The couple did not have any children, and it is possible that the marriage was never consummated.
Ramanujan suffered from various health problems throughout his life. His health declined considerably while he was living in England as the climatic conditions did not suit him. Also, he was a vegetarian who found it extremely difficult to obtain nutritious vegetarian food in England.
He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency during the late 1910s and returned home to Madras in 1919. He never fully recovered and breathed his last on 26 April 1920, aged just 32.
His birthday, 22 December, is celebrated as ‘State IT Day’ in his home state of Tamil Nadu. On the 125th anniversary of his birth, India declared his birthday as ‘National Mathematics Day.’
Exclusive information about Ramanujan:
- Ramanujan was a lonely child in school as his peers could never understand him.
- He hailed from a poor family and used a slate instead of paper to jot down the results of his derivations.
- He did not receive any formal training in pure mathematics!
- He lost his scholarship to study at Government Arts College as he was so obsessed with mathematics that he failed to clear other subjects.
- Ramanujan did not possess a college degree.
- He wrote to several prominent mathematicians, but most of them did not even respond as they dismissed him as a crank due to the lack of sophistication in his works.
- He became a victim of racism in England.
- The number 1729 is called Hardy-Ramanujan number in his honor following an incident regarding a taxi with this number.
- A biographical film in Tamil based on Ramanujan’s life was released in 2014.
- Google honored him on his 125th birth anniversary by replacing its logo with a doodle on its home page.