Ramanujan: From a Clerk To a World Class Mathematician

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in Erode, in Tamil Nadu, India. His father was K. Srinivasa Iyengar, an accounting clerk for a clothing merchant. His mother was Komalatammal, who earned a small amount of money each month as a local temple singer. Born in a Hindu Brahmin family, his mother ensured the boy was in tune with Brahmin traditions and culture. Although his family was of high caste, they were destitute.

His interest and devotion to mathematics were to the point of obsession. In 1907 when Ramanujan started thinking of a career in Mathematics, he was poor, had no formal college education, and desperately needed a benefactor. Seshu Aiyar, a professor at Presidency College, Madras, suggested Ramanujan write letters to G.H. Hardy, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Cayley Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge, a celebrated mathematician who was 10 years senior to Ramanujan.

Prof. Hardy puzzled over nine pages of mathematical notes that Ramanujan had sent. They seemed rather incredible. He reviewed the papers with J. E. Littlewood, another eminent Cambridge mathematician, telling Littlewood that they had been written by either a crank or a genius, but he wasn’t sure which. After spending two and a half hours poring over the outlandishly original work, the mathematicians concluded. They were looking at the papers of a mathematical genius!

Hardy, intrigued by Ramanujan’s letter and notes, took them to Cambridge’s colleagues. And here began a different era in mathematics which showed the world the beauty of mathematics, with an example of everlasting friendship proving how a passion can break all the barriers of ethical, cultural, religious differences.

In 1918 Ramanujan became the first Indian mathematician to be elected a Fellow of the British Royal Society. In his short lifetime, he produced almost 4000 proofs, identities, conjectures, and equations. His Theta function lies at the heart of String theory in physics.

In a famous anecdote, Hardy took a cab to visit Ramanujan. When he got there, he told Ramanujan that the cab’s number 1729 was “rather a dull one.” Ramanujan said, “No, it is an exciting number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways. That is, 1729 = 1^3 + 12^3 = 9^3 + 10^3.” This number is now called the Hardy-Ramanujan number, and the smallest numbers that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in n different ways have been dubbed taxicab numbers. The next number in the sequence, the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in three different ways, is 87,539,319.

Ramanujan died aged 32 in Madras on April 26, 1920, due to hepatic amoebiasis caused by liver parasites. Hardy and Ramanujan’s bond was firm. Hardy served as a father-figure to Ramanujan, a distant, impersonal father who was the ideal taskmaster and had high expectations of Ramanujan.

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