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About Srinivasa Ramanujan


Well known mathematicians Professors G.H. Hardy and J.E. Littlewood compared Ramajuan’s mathematical abilities and natural genius with all-time great mathematicians like Leonhard Euler, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Karl Gustav Jacobi. The influence of Ramanujan on number theory is without parallel in mathematics. His papers, problems and letters would continue to captivate mathematicians in the future. He rediscovered a century of mathematics and made new discoveries. Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar (best known as Srinivasa Ramanujan) was born on 22 December, 1887, in Erode about 400 km from Chennai (formerly known as Madras). While at school, Ramanujan came across a book entitled "A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics" by George Shoobridge Carr. This book had a great influence on Ramanujan’s career. G.H. Hardy (1877 – 1947), a prominent English mathematician wrote about the book: “He (Carr) is now completely forgotten, even in his college, except in so far as Ramanujan kept his name alive”. Ramanujan solved all the problems in Carr’s Synopsis. While working on Carr’s Synopsis, he discovered many others new formulae, and he began the practice of compiling a notebook. Between 1903 and 1914 he had compiled three notebooks. Much of Ramanujan’s mathematics comes under the field of number theory — a purest realm of mathematics. During his short lifetime, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations). He stated results that were both original and highly unconventional, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, and these have inspired a vast amount of further research in the area of mathematics.

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