Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician born in 1887 in Erode, a small town in Tamil Nadu. His family was poor but educated. His father was a clerk and his mother was a devout Hindu. From a young age, he loved numbers. By the age of twelve, he was working through advanced mathematics books on his own. He had very little formal mathematical training. He failed his college exams because he spent all his time on mathematics and neglected other subjects. He lost his scholarship. He worked as a clerk in Madras and did mathematics in every spare moment. He filled notebooks with thousands of results, many of which were new and surprising. In 1913, he wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, a leading mathematician at Cambridge University in England. The letter contained strange and beautiful formulas. Hardy was amazed. He invited Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914. The two men worked together for five years. Ramanujan produced brilliant results on number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Life in England was hard. The climate was cold. The food was wrong for his vegetarian diet. He became very ill, possibly with tuberculosis or a parasitic infection. He returned to India in 1919 and died in 1920, aged only 32. His notebooks are still being studied today.
Ramanujan matters for three big reasons. First, his mathematics is deep and still useful. His formulas appear in modern physics, in computer science, and in the theory of black holes. Mathematicians are still proving things he only guessed a hundred years ago.
Second, he changed who mathematics belongs to. He was poor, self-taught, and from a country that was under British colonial rule. The leading universities of his time were not built for someone like him. Yet he became one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century. His story broke the idea that world-class mathematics required the right background, the right school, or the right country.
Third, his way of thinking was different. He had almost no access to the modern proofs that European mathematicians relied on. He got his results through intuition, calculation, and what he called divine inspiration. This makes his work a puzzle for historians and mathematicians. How did he know? His method cannot be fully explained, but it produced truths that later mathematics has confirmed. He shows that there is more than one path to mathematical knowledge.
For a first introduction, Robert Kanigel's biography The Man Who Knew Infinity, published in 1991, is the most popular account of Ramanujan's life. It was made into a film in 2015 with Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. The film is accurate in broad outline, less so in detail. The BBC documentary Ramanujan: Letters from an Indian Clerk is a shorter watch. For children, The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity by Amy Alznauer is a lovely picture book. The Indian government's website for National Mathematics Day has good introductory material.
Bruce C. Berndt, one of the leading scholars of Ramanujan's notebooks, has written a series of books called Ramanujan's Notebooks (five volumes). These are serious but accessible for people with some university mathematics. S. R.
The Man and the Mathematician, published in 1967 by an Indian librarian who knew people close to Ramanujan, offers an Indian perspective that Kanigel's book does not have. G. H.
Twelve Lectures is the classic mathematical appreciation. The Ramanujan Mathematical Society in India publishes regularly on his work.
Ramanujan was a magical genius whose work cannot be explained.
His work is now well understood by mathematicians. Most of his results have been proved. A few have been shown to be wrong. His methods, though unusual, can be studied. He had absorbed a huge amount of calculation and pattern recognition. His intuitions were trained by thousands of hours of work. Calling him magical makes him less real. He was a human being with extraordinary talent and discipline.
Ramanujan's mathematics is old-fashioned and no longer relevant.
His mathematics is more relevant today than ever. His mock theta functions connect to black holes and string theory. His partition formulas are used in modern combinatorics. His formulas for pi are used in computers. The Ramanujan Journal publishes new research inspired by his ideas every year. Mathematicians are still proving things he only guessed. His work is not historical decoration. It is living mathematics.
Without G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan's talent would have been lost.
Hardy was crucial, but he was not the first to support Ramanujan. Indian patrons, including Ramaswamy Iyer, Ramachandra Rao, and Narayana Iyer, recognised his talent first. They gave him jobs, money, and encouragement. They helped him prepare the letter to Hardy. This misconception centres the British part of the story and erases the Indian part. The full story is about a network of people, both Indian and British, who saw what he could do.
Ramanujan died of tuberculosis from the cold English climate.
This was the long-accepted story but is now questioned. In the 1990s, Dr D. A. B. Young and others studied the medical evidence. They argued that Ramanujan more likely had hepatic amoebiasis, a parasitic infection he probably picked up in India years before. It was treatable but not diagnosed at the time. Cold weather and stress in England made things worse, but they were probably not the root cause. This correction matters because it changes the moral: his death was less about racial mismatch and more about missed medical care.
For research-level study, Bruce Berndt and Robert Rankin's two-volume Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary and Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys are essential. Ken Ono and Amir Aczel's My Search for Ramanujan describes modern work on the mock theta functions. Zwegers's 2002 Utrecht thesis is available online for those wanting to read the key breakthrough on mock theta functions. For the medical reassessment, see D. A. B. Young, Ramanujan's Illness, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1994. For colonial and cultural context, Gyan Prakash's Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India places Ramanujan within the broader history of science under British rule.
Your feedback helps other teachers and helps us improve TeachAnyClass.