#SrinivasaRamanujan #LostTales
The world has only now started to admire the genius of a man who, despite having no formal training in pure mathematics, made substantial contributions to #mathematics.
India's greatest mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, lived a short but very productive life and continues to be an inspiration for mathematicians across the world, and his work has inspired a lot of research over the years.
- Ramanujan was one of several siblings, but he lost all of them to a smallpox epidemic in 1889. He contracted it too but recovered, unlike thousands in Madras who lost their lives to the disease.
- The young genius didn't like attending school, and a constable was enlisted by his family to make sure he did.
- At the age of 11, he came across two college students who lodged at his home for a period of time, and he took the opportunity to learn all he could from them. Later, when he was 12, he got a tougher book from a senior school student--- S.L. Linney's Plane Trigonometry. By the time he was 13, Ramanujan had mastered this book completely and was already working on his own sophisticated theorems.
- As he worked on his theorems, Ramanujan couldn't use paper as it was quite expensive. He worked on his derivations on the slate, choosing to note down only the important results and summaries in his notebooks. Between 1913 and 1920, this impoverished clerk from South India—a two-time college dropout—upended mathematics with strange and beautiful equations that he seemed to pull out of thin air.
- Ramanujan’s story is tragically short. He died at age 32. But in that time, he filled three notebooks with equations that continue to perplex and intrigue mathematicians, helping them to unravel the intricacies of black holes and string theory—subjects that didn’t even exist in Ramanujan’s day.
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