| Shrinivas
Aiyangar Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 in a Brahmin family in Southern India.
His father was an accountant for the local traders, and was by no means well off. At the
age of five, Ramanujan started attending primary school at Kumbakonam, his father’s
place of work. Even during his school days his grasp of mathematical concepts was
exceptional. He mystified his teachers and classmates with rapid calculations of long
mathematical problems. At home too, his mind appeared to be busy thinking about and
mentally playing around with numbers. The society in which he lived was appreciative of
learning in general, and of mathematical aptitude in particular. His school friends recall approaching him for help
in Mathematics. This he would readily provide enthusiastically. Though they knew that his
grasp of the subject was much more, they could not fathom the depth of his intellect. It
was after he entered Town High School at Kumbakonam in 1898 that his genius took wings. In
1900, he began working on summing up of geometric and arithmetic series. Interestingly, in
1902 when he was taught cubic equations he went right ahead and evolved his own method to
solve quartics. Going a step further, he tried solving quintics by the same method but
failed to do so.
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The year 1902 marked a turning point in Ramanujan’s life. From the local library he got hold of a copy of a book on pure mathematics by G S Carr entitled Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics. The book was a collection of around 6,000 theorems and formulae with short proofs. Written in a concise manner, by a tutor, the book served to unfold uncharted fields for Ramanujan’s intellectual quests. Carr’s book was fairly outdated being published in 1856. Carr himself was never renowned as a great mathematician. But his book definitely was a scholarly and lively written text by one who obviously enjoyed mathematics. It not only provided the required thrust to Ramanujan’s genius but the influence of the book was to be felt in his works even after he had received much wider exposure to theories concurrent with the times then.
In 1904, when he was just 16, Ramanujan began investigating the series of S (1/n) and calculated Euler’s Constant to 15 decimal places. His study of Bernoulli numbers also commenced at this stage. In recognition of his excellent school performance, Ramanujan was offered a scholarship at Government College, Kumbakonam. His preoccupation with mathematics led him to neglect other |
subjects, and unfortunately, the college failed to renew his scholarship the following year. This was a setback that he took to heart and without informing his parents, went to Vishakhapatnam about 650 kms. from Madras. He continued his research work and focused on relations between integrals and series. During the years in college, the professors
of mathematics particularly Ramanujachari and Mudaliar quickly realized the worth of their
precocious student. Often when a complex problem was explained to the class, Ramanujan
would stand up and offer another solution which was easy and involved fewer steps. |
