Dr. Srinivasa Ramanujan

The man who taught infinity

Dr. Srinivasa Ramanujan, in the middle, with fellow Scientists, his contributions were to the fields of mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

Here's a timeline of Dr. Srinivasa Ramanujan's life:

  • 1887 - Born in Erode, Mysore, India
  • 1889 - Moved to Kanchipuram, Chennai due to smallpox outbreak.
  • 1892 - enrolled in local school, his family enlisted a local constable to make sure he attended school.
  • 1897 - passed his primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography, and arithmetic with the best scores in the district. That year, Ramanujan entered Town Higher Secondary School, where he encountered formal mathematics for the first time.
  • 1904 - independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places, graduated from Town Higher Secondary School, was awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school's headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer.
  • 1906 - Ramanujan failed his Fellow of Arts exam in December 1906 and again a year later. Without an FA degree, he left college and continued to pursue independent research in mathematics, living in extreme poverty and often on the brink of starvation.
  • 1910 - after a meeting between the 23-year-old Ramanujan and the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, Ramanujan began to get recognition in Madras's mathematical circles, leading to his inclusion as a researcher at the University of Madras.
  • 1911 - In his 17-page paper "Some Properties of Bernoulli's Numbers", Ramanujan gave three proofs, two corollaries and three conjectures.
  • 1913 - Received a letter from Hardy expressing interest in his work, adding that it was "essential that I should see proofs of some of your assertions". He refused to leave his country to "go to a foreign land".
  • 1914 - Traveled to England by ship, leaving his wife to stay with his parents in India. Hardy had already received 120 theorems from Ramanujan in the first two letters, but there were many more results and theorems in the notebooks. Hardy saw that some were wrong, others had already been discovered, and the rest were new breakthroughs. Ramanujan left a deep impression on Hardy and Littlewood. Littlewood commented, "I can believe that he's at least a Jacobi", while Hardy said he "can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi."
  • 1916 - was awarded a Bachelor of Arts by Research degree(the predecessor of the PhD degree) for his work on highly composite numbers, sections of the first part of which had been published the preceding year in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. The paper was more than 50 pages long and proved various properties of such numbers. Hardy disliked this topic area but remarked that though it engaged with what he called the 'backwater of mathematics', in it Ramanujan displayed 'extraordinary mastery over the algebra of inequalities'.
  • 1917 - was elected to the London Mathematical Society.
  • 1918 - was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the second Indian admitted, after Ardaseer Cursetjee in 1841. At age 31, Ramanujan was one of the youngest Fellows in the Royal Society's history. He was elected "for his investigation in elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers." On 13 October 1918, he was the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
  • 1919 - was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency, and confined to a sanatorium. He returned to Kumbakonam, Madras Presidency
  • 1920 - died at the age of 32. After his death, his brother Tirunarayanan compiled Ramanujan's remaining handwritten notes, consisting of formulae on singular moduli, hypergeometric series and continued fractions.
An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.

-- Dr. Srinivas Ramanujan