Srinivasa Ramanujan

SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN
 MEMBERS
Danish Karthik

Pratyussh
Suyash Raaed

Krish
Arpit Abid
 Early Life
• Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil
Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras Presidency , at the residence of
his maternal grandparents.
• His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, worked as a clerk in
a sari shop . His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and sang at a
local Temple. They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani
Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam.
• On 1 October 1892 Ramanujan was enrolled at the local [Link] his
maternal grandfather lost his job as a court official in Kanchipuram,
Ramanujan and his mother moved back to Kumbakonam and he was
enrolled in Kangayan Primary School. When his paternal grandfather died,
he was sent back to his maternal grandparents, then living in Madras. He
did not like school in Madras, and tried to avoid attending . Since
Ramanujan's father was at work most of the day, his mother took care of
the boy, and they had a close relationship.
•  At Kangayan Primary School , Ramanujan performed well. Just before
turning 10, in November 1897, he 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.
• A child prodigy 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 written by S. L. Loney on advanced [Link] mastered
this by the age of 13 while discovering sophisticated theorems on his own. By 14 he received merit
certificates and academic awards that continued throughout his school career .
• In 1903, when he was 16, Ramanujan obtained from a friend a library copy of A Synopsis of Elementary
Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, G. S. Carr’s collection of 5,000 theorems . Ramanujan reportedly
studied the contents of the book in [Link] book is generally acknowledged as a key element in awakening
his [Link] next year Ramanujan independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and
calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places.
• 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 received a
scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but was so intent on mathematics that he
could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process. In August
1905 Ramanujan ran away from home, heading towards Visakhapatnam, and stayed in Rajahmundry , for
about a [Link] later enrolled at Pachaiyappa's College in Madras. There he passed in mathematics,
choosing only to attempt questions that appealed to him and leaving the rest unanswered, but performed
poorly in other subjects. 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.
 Start of his career
In 1910, Ramanujan met deputy collector V. Ramaswamy Aiyer,
who founded the Indian Mathematical Society. Wishing for a job
at the revenue department where Aiyer worked, Ramanujan
showed him his mathematics notebooks. Aiyer sent Ramanujan
to his mathematician friends in Madras.
Some of them looked at his work and gave him letters of
introduction to R. Ramachandra Rao, the district collector for
Nellore and the secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society.
 Rao was impressed by Ramanujan's research but doubted that
it was his own work.
Ramanujan discussed his elliptic integrals, hypergeometric
series, and his theory of divergent series, which Rao said
ultimately convinced him of Ramanujan's brilliance. When Rao
asked him what he wanted, Ramanujan replied that he needed
work and financial support
•Rao agreed and sent him to Madras. He continued his research with Rao's financial
aid. With iyer's help, Ramanujan had his work published in the Journal of the Indian
Mathematical Society. Ramanujan learned that he had been accepted as a Class III,
Grade IV accounting clerk, making 30 rupees per month. At his office Ramanujan
easily and quickly completed the work he was given and spent his spare time doing
mathematical research. Ramanujan's boss, Sir Francis Spring, and S. Narayana Iyer, a
colleague, encouraged Ramanujan in his mathematical pursuits. He started
contacting British mathematicians like G. H. Hardy. Hardy found most of these
theorems extraordinary and stated that Ramanujan was “a mathematician of the
highest quality”. Hardy wrote Ramanujan a letter saying that he should see proofs of
some of his works. Ramanujan at first refused to travel to a foreign land but later on
agreed and traveled to England by ship, leaving his wife to stay with his parents in
India.
 • Awarded BS degree by Research
(later called PhD) in March 1916

• Elected to London Mathematical

Society on 6th Dec 1971

Achievements • Became a “Fellow of the Royal

Society” in 1918

• Became the first Indian to be

elected a “Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge.”
Ramanujan’s contribution to
Mathematics
• This goes back to the year 1919, when two world renowned mathematicians met to debate a rather
odd topic. Believe it or not, the debate was about a taxi number – 1729  and its importance!
• While one, (the famous mathematician G.H. Hardy) argued that the number 1729 was a boring,
ordinary number with nothing special to it, the other mathematician proved him wrong.
• He stated that, “It is a magic number which can do wonders! That’s because, the number 1729 is
the only smallest number expressible as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways.”

That great Mozart of Mathematics was Srinivasa Ramanujan, who also introduced to the world the
value of Infinity. Did you know, after Ramanujan demonstrated the wonder of the number 1729,
it got recognized as The Ramanujan Number!
 • India's greatest mathematical genius who made
substantial contribution to the analytical theory of
numbers, elliptic functions, continued fractions and
infinite series. His contributions include:
• Landau–Ramanujan constant

Ramanujan’s other • Ramanujan conjecture

• Ramanujan prime
contribution to • Ramanujan–Soldner constant

Mathematics • Ramanujan theta function

• Ramanujan's summation
• Rogers–Ramanujan identities
• Ramanujan's master theorem
• Ramanujan–Sato series
 Famous book based
on S.R Ramanujan
THE MAN WHO KNEW
INFINITY BY ROBERT
KANIGAL

ON THE SAME BOOK,A FILM HAS

BEEN MADE
ILLNESS AND DEATH

Ramanujan was affected by health problems throughout his life. His

health worsened in England; possibly due to the difficulty of keeping to
the strict dietary requirements of his religion there and because of
wartime rationing in 1914–18. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and
a severe vitamin deficiency, and confined to a medical facility. In 1919
he returned to Kumbakonam, Madras Presidency, and in 1920 he 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.