Fabulous Personalities- 16

DR.SUNDAR RAM MBBS., MD

Srinivasa Ramanujan, the genius mathematician India has ever produced contibuted a great deal to mathematics that only a few could overtake in their lifetime. He made substantial contributions to the analyticaltheory of numbers and worked on Elliptic functions, continued fractions and infinite series.Despite his lack of formal education and a short life span,he has left behind 3900 original theorems ,majority of which are vindicated scientifically.

EARLY CAREER

SrinivasaRamanujan was born on December 22,1887 in the town of Erode in Tamilnadu. His father was SrinivasaIyengar , an accounting clerk for a clothing merchant. His mother Komalatammal was a housewife and sang at a local temple. From his mother,Ramanujan learned about tradition and puranas and he adhered to the Brahmin culture strictly ever.

At age 10, Ramanujan was the top student in his district and he started high school at the Kumbakonam Town High School. By age 12, he had begun serious self-study of mathematics, working through cubic equations and arithmetic and geometric series. He invented his own method of solving quartic equations.As Ramanujan’s mathematical knowledge developed, his main source of inspiration and expertise became Synopsis of elementary results in pure mathematics by George S. Carr.

THE GENIUS
MATHEMATICIAN

Ramanujan’s work, however, was hard to understand. The style he had adopted as a schoolboy, after digesting George S. Carr’s book, contributed to the problem. His mathematics often left too few clues to allow anyone who wasn’t also a mathematical genius to see how he obtained his results.But his work was recognized by G. H. Hardy an eminent pure mathematician at the University of Cambridge in 1913.Hardy invited him to London and that event further instigated Ramanujan to excel at his most lovable field of interest.

CONTRIBUTIONS
TO MATHEMATICS

  • He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series, in which he found a value for the sum of such series using a technique he invented that came to be called Ramanujan summation.
  • One remarkable result of the Hardy-Ramanujan collaboration was a formula for the number p(n) of partitions of a number n.
  • In his short lifetime he produced almost 4000 proofs, identities, conjectures, and equations in pure mathematics.
  • In the last year of his life, Ramanujan discovered mock theta functions.For many years these functions were a mystery, but they are now known to be the holomorphic parts of harmonic weak Maass forms.

ACHIEVEMENTS

  • Ramanujan’s birthday December 22 is celebrated as the ‘State IT day’ in his birthstate of Tamilnadu.
  • The GOI on his 125th anniversary declared his birthday as the National Mathematics Day which is annually celebrated since.
  • An IT city in chennai has been named after him.
  • Stamps picturing Ramanujan were released by the GOI in 1962,2011,2012 posthumously.
  • The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has created a prize in Ramanujan’s name for young mathematicians from developing countries in cooperation with the International Mathematical Union, which nominates members of the prize committee.

•           Ramanujan finally left behind three notebooks and a sheaf of pages which were collectively published as The Lost Notebook contained numerous groundbreaking results which were proven long after his death.