Imagine someone mastering trigonometry by the age of 13, solving infinite series by the age of 14 and inventing new ways to solve higher order equations by the age of 15! All of this, without any formal training in mathematics
This someone was none other than, S. Ramanujan.
In his short life of just 32 years, Ramanujan changed the course of mathematics. But the man had his own share of struggle. Ramanujan was born in Madras, British India, to a very
humble family. His father was a clerk in a shop and his mother was a housewife who sang at a local temple. At an early age Ramanujan showed signs of his mathematical genius but he
struggled a lot at other subjects, often failing in them. When he was 11 years old, he was gifted a book on trigonometry. Ramanujan mastered trigonometry in just 2 years. But The book
that really changed his life was the containing 5000 theorems which he studied in detail. By 16, he was developing his own theorems.
Back in 1900s, Mathematics was not an option
to make a living in India. He showed his work to many foreign mathematicians but all of them said that Ramanujan was unconventional and lacked a formal education. But when his
work came across the desk of G.H Hardy in England, the latter could not believe his eyes. Hardy decided to call Ramanujan to England. Hardy along with his colleage Littlewood,
further examined Ramanujan's work after which Littlwood said, "I think we can compare him with the great German mathematician, Jacobi".
In England, Ramanujan made a great progress working with hardy and littlewood. Ramanujan was exceptionally good at infitine series. Before him, there was an infite series for pi.
The problem was that it very slow. It took 600 terms to come to the value 3.14. Ramanujan, on the other hand, developed a series that would converge to 3.141592 just after 1 term!
After spending time with him, Littlewood told Hardy, "Forget Jacobi, we can compare him with Newton"
Another famous incident that shows Ramanujan's genius was when Hardy once came to meet him. When he got there, he told Ramanujan that the cab’s number, 1729, was “rather a dull one.”
Ramanujan said, “No, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways." 1 cube + 12 cube and 9 cube + 10 cube. This number
is now known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number.
The best incident that is noteworthy is when Hardy came up with a scale of mathematical ability
that went from 0 to 100. He put himself at 25. David Hilbert, the great German mathematician, was at 80. Ramanujan was 100.
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