Who was ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was an Indian mathematician who made great and original contributions to many mathematical fields, including Hardy, who was a great mathematician in his own right, recognized Ramanujan's genius from a series of letters that Ramanujan sent to mathematicians at Cambridge in 1913. Like much of his writing, the letters contained a dizzying array of unique and difficult results, stated without much explanation or proof. The contrast between Hardy, who was above all concerned with mathematical rigor and purity, and Ramanujan, whose writing was difficult to read and peppered with mistakes but bespoke an almost supernatural insight, produced a rich partnership. Since his death, Ramanujan's writings (many contained in his famous notebooks) have been studied extensively. Some of his conjectures and assertions have led to the creation of new fields of study. Some of his formulas are believed to be true but as yet unproven. There are many existing biographies of Ramanujan. The Man Who Knew Infinity, by Robert Kanigel, is an accessible and well-researched historical account of his life. The rest of this wiki will give a brief and light summary of the mathematical life of Ramanujan. As an appetizer, here is an anecdote from Kanigel's book. In 1914, Ramanujan's friend P. C. Mahalanobis gave him a problem he had read in the English magazine Strand. The problem was to determine the number \( x \) of a particular house on a street where the houses were number...

In the 2009 biopic of Charles Darwin, Creation, there is nothing mystical or mysterious. As Darwin uncovers one of the most fundamental processes of the universe, his psychological journey gets heavily infused with the conflict he has with the faith of his wife and the memories of his daughter. Eventually though, it is his wife who gave him the final push to publish his famous On the Origin of Species. In a subtle, non-mystical way, the feminine plays a vital role in the movie adaptation of the book. The intuitive component of our psyche is always feminine. The deeper we delve into our intuitive realms, the more sacred the feminine becomes. In societies where the divine feminine is not suppressed by cultures and dogmas, it manifests as the agency that delivers the genius his song or his equation. In India, we have a long tradition of the goddesses appearing in the dreams or in a luminal experience of geniuses. A well-attested tradition is that of Thiru Gnana Sambandar, who was given the milk of wisdom by Goddess Parvati. The songs with their supra-human mathematical precision of rhythm and meaning — entire poems written in the form of palindromes — show that Sambandar was a genius. Tradition, of course, attributes it to the divine milk. In oral traditions about Kalidasa in northern India and Kalamega Kavi in the south, we see the goddess appearing in a subliminal realm that exists between dream and reality. She either writes the pranava mantra on the tongue, as in the Kali...

“I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age… After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics.” — Srinivasa Ramanujan What is the source of scientific inspiration? Are we the mental recipients of a reality out there, which is communicated to us through the unfolding of consciousness, whether in the form of deep intuition or divine inspiration? Does discovery arise out of knowledge, or does the unknown define the nature of discovery? Is the brain a receiver, or a channel of truths arising out of a dimension beyond the physical?How does theindividual brain interpret and represent new information from beyond the frontiers of the known? On 16 January 1913, Srinivasa Ramanujan, an unknown Indian petty clerk from Madras, sent nine pages of mathematics to the esteemed mathematician of Trinity College, Cambridge, Prof. G.H. Hardy. Previous attempts to share his work withBritish academics had failed. M. J. M. Hill of University College London had seen some talent, but commented that Ramanujan’s papers were riddled with holes. H. F. Baker and E. W. Hobson, returned Ramanujan’s papers without comment.Even theesteemed mathematicianG.H. Hardy of Cambridgefirstsuspected that these nine pages of notation could be a fraud. Yet, perusing the document, Hardy became intrigued. He recognised some of the Indian’s formula...

By India Today Web Desk: In the words of Albert Einstein, "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." The credit for all the development in 20th century mathematics is given to the final writings, theories and developments of mathematics' genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar, who was born on December 22, 1887. Living in the British Raj, he worked in the fields of Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry. On his birth anniversary today, let us tell you more about the Mathematic genius: 1. Ramanujan, learned about Hindu tradition and puranas from his mother. He also learned to sing religious songs, to attend pujas at the temple, and to keep particular eating habits. All of these were a part of the Brahmin culture. 6. In 1903, when he was 16, Ramanujan had studied G. S. Carr's 'A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics' in detail. The book was a collection of 5,000 theorems. 7. He failed most of the subjects in school because he read and studied only mathematics. 8. As he did not have any degrees, he used his theories to apply for jobs. He left college yet continued to pursue independent research in mathematics. At that point in his life, he lived in extreme poverty and starvation. 9. When he was 17, he developed the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant to 15 decimal places. 10. His mathematical studies impressed the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, so much so that Aiyer gave his le...

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who made significant contributions to the field of mathematics. He was born in 1887 in India and died in 1920 at the age of 32. Ramanujan's work on mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions is widely regarded as some of the most impressive work in the field. Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the most influential mathematicians of all time. His contributions to mathematics have had a lasting impact on the field, and he remains a revered figure in the mathematics community. But who was Srinivasa Ramanujan? What made him so influential? Why do his contributions still resonate today? Who Was Srinivasa Ramanujan? Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician wh0 was born in 1887 in India and died in 1920 at the age of 32. Ramanujan's work on mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions is widely regarded as some of the most impressive work in the field. He also made substantial contributions to the theory of partitions, which is a branch of number theory that deals with the ways that numbers can be divided into smaller parts. Ramanujan's work has been influential in many different areas of mathematics, and he is considered one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time. ALSO READ: What is Srinivasa Ramanujan remembered for? Srinivasa Ramanujan is an Indian mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, and Continue...

Throughout the history of mathematics, there has been no one remotely like Srinivasa Ramanujan. There is no doubt that he was a great mathematician, but had he had simply a good university education and been taught by a good professor in his field, we wouldn’t have As the years pass, I admire more and more the astonishing body of work Ramanujan produced in India before he made contact with any top mathematicians. Not because the results he got at the time changed the face of mathematics, far from it, but because, working by himself, he fearlessly attacked many important and some not so important problems in analysis and, especially, number theory – simply for the love of mathematics. It cannot be understated, however, the role played by Ramanujan’s tutor Godfrey Harold Hardy in his life story. The Cambridge mathematician worked tirelessly with the Indian genius, to tame his creativity within the then current understanding of the field. It was only with Hardy’s care and mentoring that Ramanujan became the scholar we know him as today. Srinivasa Ramanujan. Determined and obsessed In December 1903, at the age of 16, Ramanujan passed the matriculation exam for the University of Madras. But as he concentrated on mathematics to the exclusion of all other subjects, he did not progress beyond the second year. In 1909 he married a nine-year-old girl, but failed to secure any steady income until the beginning of 1912, when he became a clerk in the Madras Port Trust office on a meagr...

“ I would like to make a couple of observations about ‘modernisation’. One might see ‘modernisation’ in India as a movement from the context-sensitive to the context-free in all realms: an erosion of contexts, at least in principle,” wrote A. K. Ramanujan in 1989 in his now famous essay, ‘ Is There An Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay’. With this seminal work, Ramanujan, poet, scholar, philologist, Samskara) and playwright, introduced a brilliant insight into the Indian ways of thinking. He argued that Indians had a very context-sensitive way of thinking whereas the Western world chose to live a context-free life. This was a departure from the conventional thought that dismissed the Indian way of thinking as merely traditional. His In fact, his diary entries were written in Born on 16 March 1929 in what was then Mysore, Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan went on to produce a huge body of literature, ranging from poetry and diary entries to folk tales and essays grounded in academic theory. Even though he Soon, On 1 July, 1959, he On his 91st birth anniversary, at a time when India is grappling with the question of what it means to be Indian, it is worth revisiting his most famous essay. Also read: ‘Is there an Indian way of thinking?’ He begins the essay by asking whether there is a specific Indian way of thinking. What’s astute in his analysis is how he works out the meaning of the question itself. “Depending on where the stress is placed, it ...

Oberwolfach Photo Collection Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. His life story, with its humble and sometimes difficult beginnings, is as interesting in its own right as his astonishing work was. • The book that started it all A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics (1880, revised in 1886), by George Shoobridge Carr. The book consists solely of thousands of • Early failures Despite being a prodigy in mathematics, Ramanujan did not have an auspicious start to his career. He obtained a scholarship to college in 1904, but he quickly lost it by failing in nonmathematical subjects. Another try at college in • Go west, young man Ramanujan rose in prominence among Indian mathematicians, but his colleagues felt that he needed to go to the West to come into contact with the forefront of mathematical research. Ramanujan started writing letters of introduction to professors at the • Get pi fast In his notebooks, Ramanujan wrote down 17 ways to represent 1/ • Taxicab numbers In a famous anecdote, Hardy took a cab to visit Ramanujan. When he got there, he told Ramanujan that the cab’s number, 1729, was “rather a dull one.” Ramanujan said, “No, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways. That is, 1729 = 1^3 + 12^3 = 9^3 + 10^3. This number is now called the Hardy-Ramanujan number, and the smallest numbers that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in n dif...