Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar was born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, in the Madras Presidency of British India. He grew up in Kumbakonam, where he showed an early and intense interest in mathematics. With limited access to formal instruction beyond school-level texts, he worked through problems independently and began filling notebooks with results, many of which were entirely original.

Ramanujan's formal education was interrupted when his absorption in mathematics led to failures in other subjects, causing him to lose scholarships. He worked for a time as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust while continuing to develop his mathematical ideas. In 1913 he wrote to the British mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, enclosing a selection of his results. Hardy, recognising the extraordinary nature of the work, arranged for Ramanujan to travel to Cambridge.

Between 1914 and 1919, Ramanujan worked in Cambridge alongside Hardy and J. E. Littlewood. The collaboration was highly productive. Ramanujan contributed results in areas including the theory of partitions, the properties of highly composite numbers, modular equations, and approximations to pi. He and Hardy jointly developed what became known as the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the partition function.

Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, one of the youngest individuals to receive that distinction at the time, and was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the same year.

His health deteriorated significantly during his years in England, partly due to the climate and difficulties in maintaining his dietary practices. He returned to India in 1919. He died on 26 April 1920 in Chetput, Madras, at the age of 32. The notebooks he left behind, including what is known as the lost notebook discovered in 1976, continued to yield significant mathematical results decades after his death.