Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887–1920, Erode, Tamil Nadu, India, Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, India
Self-taught Indian mathematician who, with almost no formal training, produced thousands of remarkable results in number theory, infinite series and continued fractions, and co-developed the circle method with G. H. Hardy.
Ramanujan grew up in Kumbakonam and taught himself advanced mathematics from a single out-of-date textbook, G. S. Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics, working independently and rediscovering many known results as well as producing striking new ones. Lacking formal qualifications after failing college examinations in non-mathematical subjects, he worked as a clerk in Madras while continuing his research and publishing in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.
In January 1913 Ramanujan wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy describing his results; Hardy and Littlewood recognised that, alongside known theorems, the letter contained results 'that must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them'. Hardy brought Ramanujan to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1914, beginning an extraordinary collaboration that produced an asymptotic formula for the partition function p(n) and results on hypergeometric series, modular forms and highly composite numbers. In 1918 Ramanujan became the first Indian elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College. Plagued by ill health throughout his time in England, he returned to India in 1919 and died in Kumbakonam the following year, aged 32; his notebooks continued to inspire new mathematics for decades afterward.
Workplaces: Trinity College, Cambridge
India, United Kingdom