Srinivasa Ramanujan

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.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, Madras Presidency, to K. Srinivasa Iyengar and his wife Komalatammal. His family was a humble one and his father worked as a clerk in a sari shop. His mother gave birth to several children after Ramanujan, but none of them survived infancy.

Ramanujan contracted smallpox in 1889 but recovered from the potentially fatal disease. While a young child, he spent considerable time in his maternal grandparents’ home.

He started his schooling in 1892. Initially he did not like school though he soon started excelling in his studies, especially mathematics.

After passing out of Kangayan Primary School, he enrolled at Town Higher Secondary School in 1897. He soon discovered a book on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney which he mastered by the time he was 13. He proved to be brilliant student and won several merit certificates and academic awards.

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 fascinated by the book and spent months studying it in detail. This book is credited to have awakened the mathematical genius in him.

After dropping out of college, he struggled to make a living and lived in poverty for a while. He also suffered from poor health and had to undergo a surgery in 1910. After recuperating, he continued his search for a job.

He tutored some college students while desperately searching for a clerical position in Madras. Finally he had a meeting with deputy collector V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, who had recently founded the Indian Mathematical Society. Impressed by the young man’s works, Aiyer sent him with letters of introduction to R. Ramachandra Rao, the district collector for Nellore and the secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society.

Rao, though initially skeptical of the young man’s abilities soon changed his mind after Ramanujan discussed elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, and his theory of divergent series with him. Rao agreed to help him get a job and also promised to financially fund his research.

Ramanujan got a clerical post with the Madras Port Trust, and continued his research with the financial help from Rao. His first paper, a 17-page work on Bernoulli numbers, was published with the help of Ramaswamy Aiyer, in the ‘Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society’ in 1911.

The publication of his paper helped him gain attention for his works, and soon he was popular among the mathematical fraternity in India. Wishing to further explore research in mathematics, Ramanujan began a correspondence with the acclaimed English mathematician, Godfrey H. Hardy, in 1913.

Considered to be a mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, was regarded at par with the likes of Leonhard Euler and Carl Jacobi. Along with Hardy, he studied the partition function P(n) extensively and gave a non-convergent asymptotic series that permits exact computation of the number of partitions of an integer. Their work led to the development of a new method for finding asymptotic formulae, called the circle method.