|
At age of 16 Ramanujan came across the book, A
synopsis of elementary results in pure and applied mathematics written by George
S. Carr. This book was a collection of 5000 theorems, and it introduced
Ramanujan to the world of mathematics. The next year, he had independently
developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and had calculated Euler's
constant up to 15 decimal places. He was given a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam which he entered in 1904. But he neglected his other subjects at the cost of mathematics and failed in college examination. He dropped out of the college.
Ramanujan lived off the charity of friends, filling notebooks with mathematical discoveries and seeking patrons to support his work. In 1906 Ramanujan went to Madras where he entered Pachaiyappa's College. His aim was to pass the First Arts examination which would allow him to be admitted to the University of Madras. Continuing his mathematical work Ramanujan studied continued fractions and divergent series in 1908. At this stage he became seriously ill again and underwent an operation in April 1909 after which he took him some considerable time to recover.
On 14 July 1909 Ramanujan marry a ten year old girl S Janaki Ammal. During this period Ramanujan had his first paper published, a 17-page work on Bernoulli numbers that appeared in 1911 in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. In
1911 Ramanujan approached the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society for advice on a job. He got the job of clerk
at the Madras Port Trust with the help of Indian mathematician Ramachandra
Rao.
The professor of civil engineering at the Madras Engineering College C L T Griffith was
interested in Ramanujan's abilities and, having been educated at University College London, knew the professor of mathematics there, namely M J M Hill. He wrote to Hill on 12 November 1912 sending some of Ramanujan's work and a copy of his 1911 paper on Bernoulli numbers. Hill replied in a fairly encouraging way but showed that he had failed to
understand Ramanujan's results on divergent series. In January 1913 Ramanujan wrote to G H Hardy having seen a copy of his 1910 book Orders of infinity. Hardy, together with Littlewood, studied the long list of
unproved theorems which Ramanujan enclosed with his letter. Hardy wrote back to Ramanujan and evinced interest in his work.
University of Madras gave Ramanujan a scholarship in May 1913 for two years and, in 1914, Hardy brought Ramanujan to Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin an extraordinary
collaboration. Right from the start Ramanujan's collaboration with Hardy led to important results. In a joint paper with Hardy, Ramanujan gave an asymptotic formula for p(n). It had the remarkable property that it appeared to give the correct value of
p(n), and this was later proved by Rademacher.
Ramanujan had problems settling in London. He was an orthodox Brahmin and right from the beginning he had problems with his diet. The outbreak of World War I made obtaining special items of food harder and it was not long before Ramanujan had health problems.
On 16 March 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research. He had been allowed to enrol in June 1914 despite not having the proper
qualifications. Ramanujan's dissertation was on Highly composite numbers and consisted of seven of his papers published in England.
Ramanujan left a deep impression on Hardy and Littlewood. Littlewood commented, "I can believe
that he's at least a [Carl Gustav Jacob] Jacobi," while Hardy said he "can
compare him only with [Leonhard] Euler or Jacobi." Ramanujan spent nearly five years in Cambridge collaborating with Hardy and
Littlewood and published a part of his findings there. Hardy and Ramanujan had
highly contrasting personalities. Their collaboration was a clash of different
cultures, beliefs and working styles. Hardy was an atheist and an apostle of
proof and mathematical rigour, whereas, Ramanujan was a deeply religious man and
relied very strongly on his intuition. While in England, Hardy tried his best to
fill the gaps in Ramanujan's education without interrupting his spell of
inspiration.
Ramanujan was awarded a B.A. degree by research (this degree was later renamed
PhD) in March 1916 for his work on highly composite numbers which was published
as a paper in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. The paper was over
50 pages with different properties of such numbers proven. Hardy remarked that
this was one of the most unusual papers seen in Mathematical Research at that
time and that Ramanujan showed extraordinary ingenuity in handling it. On 6
December 1917, he was elected to the London Mathematical Society. He was the
second Indian to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918 and he became one
of the youngest Fellows in the entire history of the Royal
Society. He was elected "for his investigation in Elliptic Functions and the Theory of Numbers."
On 13 October 1918, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge.
Ramanujan fell seriously ill in 1917 and his doctors feared that he would die. He did improve a little by September but spent most of his time in various nursing homes. By the end of
November 1918 Ramanujan's health had greatly improved. Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February 1919 arriving on 13 March. However his health was very poor and, despite medical treatment, he died on April 6, 1920.
Ramanujan's wife died in the late 1980s. She adopted a son only after her husband's death.
Ramanujan is generally hailed as an all time great like Euler, Gauss or Jacobi
for his natural mathematical genius. In his book Scientific Edge, noted physicist Jayant Narlikar stated that
"Srinivasa Ramanujan, discovered by the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy,
whose great mathematical findings were beginning to be appreciated from 1915 to
1919. His achievements were to be fully understood much later, well after his
untimely death in 1920. Narlikar also goes on to say that his work was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and
"could be considered in the Nobel Prize class".
Tamil Nadu celebrates December 22 (Ramanujan's birthday) as 'State IT Day', memorializing both the man and his achievements, as
a native of Tamil Nadu. A stamp picturing Ramanujan was released by the
Government of India in 1962 — the 75th anniversary of Ramanujan's birth —
commemorating his achievements in the field of number theory. A prize for young mathematicians from developing countries has been created in
the name of Ramanujan by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics
(ICTP), in cooperation with the International Mathematical Union, who nominate
members of the prize committee.
An international feature film on Ramanujan's life will begin shooting in 2007 in Tamil Nadu state and Cambridge. It is being produced by an Indo-British collaboration; it will be co-directed by Stephen Fry and Dev
Benegal. He was referred to in the film Good Will Hunting as an example of mathematical genius.
He was referred to in the film Good Will Hunting as an example of mathematical genius.
The multi-million dollar film will be shot in Erode (where Ramanujan was born) and Kumbakonam (where he grew up) in Tamil Nadu, and in Cambridge where he spent five years.
"For me, Ramanujan's work and ideas are the DNA of what powers digital technology today," says
Benegal. "When your automated teller machines divide and arrange your money before coughing it up, they are all using Ramanujan's partition theory."
Spiritually, Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri, and looked to her
for inspiration in his work. He often said, "An equation for me has no
meaning, unless it represents a thought of God."
He is the subject of David Leavitt's new novel "The Indian Clerk," released September 2007.
His biography was highlighted in the Vernor Vinge book The Peace War as well as Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach.
|
|
