National Mathematics day

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Last Updated22/12/2021

December 22, the birth anniversary of India’s famed mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, is celebrated as National Mathematics Day.
Though he passed away aged just 32, his talent and research left an indelible mark on mathematics.

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu (then Madras Presidency) in an Iyengar Brahmin family.
At age 12, despite lacking a formal education, he had excelled at trigonometry and developed many theorems by himself.
After finishing secondary school in 1904, Ramanujan became eligible for a scholarship to study at the Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but could not secure the same since he did not do well in other subjects.
At 14, Ramanujan ran away from home and enrolled at Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras, where he would only excel in mathematics without managing to wade through remaining subjects, and was unable to graduate with a Fellow of Arts degree.
Living in dire poverty, Ramanujan then pursued independent research in mathematics.
Ramanujan then began sending his work to British mathematicians.
His breakthrough arrived in 1913, when the Cambridge-based GH Hardy wrote back.
Impressed with Ramanujan’s theorems and work related to infinite series, Hardy called him to London.
In 1914, Ramanujan arrived in Britain, where Hardy got him into Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1917, Ramanujan was elected to be a member of the London Mathematical Society.
In 1918, he also became a Fellow of the Royal Society, becoming one of the youngest to achieve the feat.
His success in England notwithstanding, Ramanujan could not get accustomed to the country’s diet, and returned to India in 1919.
Ramanujan’s health continued to deteriorate, and he died in 1920 at the age of 32.

Ramanujan’s genius has been regarded by mathematicians to be at par with Euler and Jacobi from the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively.
His work in the number theory is especially regarded, and he made advances in the partition function.
Ramanujan was recognised for his mastery of continued fractions, and had worked out the Riemann series, elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, and the functional equations of the zeta function.
After his death, Ramanujan left behind three notebooks and some pages containing unpublished results, on which mathematicians continued to work on for many years.