January 14, 2025

Bowen Zhou 

12th Grade

St. Francis Preparatory High School

Srinivasa Ramanuja was an Indian mathematician who lived from 1887 to 1920. Despite being one of the greatest mathematicians to ever live, he was self-taught. He was raised in a normal family in present-day Tamil-Nadu, he moved around a lot since he had a lot of family issues, like his grandfather losing his job as a court official and later dying. 

Ramanuja first encountered and had a formal education in mathematics when he enrolled in Town Higher Secondary School. He graduated there in 1904 with the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics. He later earned a scholarship at Governments Art College but lost his scholarship because he was so focused on mathematics that he failed all his other classes. He ran away from home and enrolled at Pachaiyappa’s College, after failing his Fellow of Arts exam, he lived in extreme poverty until he met the founder of the Indian Mathematics Association, Aiyer. When Aiyer saw his notebook, he said he was “struck by the extraordinary mathematical results”. 

At first, people doubted it was his own work, like Rao, who was the district collector and secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society. But he proved he wasn’t a fraud by mentioning a correspondence with a notable professor and mathematician. Later, Rao gave him another chance and was convinced of his genius. His methods were called so terse and novel that the average mathematician would have a hard time following him. He would later go to England and spend five years at Cambridge with the help of Hardy and Littlewood. He would later die at 32 in 1920. He has always had health complications and the move to England worsened the conditions, mostly because of the strict diet of his religion and the wartime rationing.

Despite being a really religious person and relying on his insight and intuition, he still contributed a lot to the math community. Harding called his work unusually rich and there was more than meets the eye. For example, his infinite series for pi, which is used in many algorithms today. His infinite series of pi is known to be extremely accurate, it also converges very quickly making it a very good approximation of pi. In 1918, he and Hardy studied the partition function, their work later was used as the basis for finding asymptotic formulae called the circle method. Ramanujan also discovered the mock theta functions.

Ramanuja intuition and insights allowed him to make significant contributions to the math community. He was self-taught and proved his worth in the math community by creating the infinite series for pi and the partitions theory. He would be awarded posthumously and has a day dedicated to him, December 22nd. Competitions would be held in his name and in his field of mathematics. December 22nd would later be recognized as the National Mathematics Day of India.