Ramanujan – The Great Indian Mathematician
By Aarthi N. Grade 6, Birmingham, AL Numbers and great mathemagicians have always fascinated me. Srinivasa Ramanujan, perhaps the greatest mathemagician of the 20th century, was born in Erode, a small village, which is around 400 km southwest of Madras, in 1887. By the time he was ten, he was in high school. When his eleventh birthday arrived, he was immersed in advanced trigonometry.
His life ambition was to study math at the University of Madras. He soon achieved his one and only dream, and was even invited to the University of Cambridge by an Englishman named Hardy. Hardy admired Ramanujan’s math skills and wanted him to share his knowledge with students at Cambridge. One of his professors said, ‘I can strongly recommend the applicant. He is a young man of quite exceptional capacity in mathematics and especially in work relating to numbers. He has a natural aptitude for computation and is very quick at figure work.’ Ramanujan had trouble settling in at Cambridge. He was an Orthodox Brahmin, and 100% vegetarian, so food was a major problem. Being a vegetarian myself, I can only imagine his struggle. Soon, Ramanujan developed health problems. By 1909, he fell severely ill. Doctor’s feared he would die. This made him work even harder. Working on challenging math problems, which even doyens such as Einstein would have struggled with, made him feel better, and by September 1911, his health was actually improving. While ailing, he worked out the Riemann series, elliptic integrals, hyper geometric series, and functional equations of the zeta function. He also read and comprehended the ancient journals and yellowing notebooks of Leonard Euler and the Bernoulli. However, even geniuses can miscalculate sometimes. Srinivasa Ramanujan’s theories about prime numbers have been proven completely wrong by modern mathematicians. This however, does not make his eminence in his field any less. In 1919, Ramanujan fell sick yet again. This time, sadly, even the remedy of mathematics was no match for his malady. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the greatest mathemagician of the 20th century, died on April 26th, 1920. Today thousands of young and old people use his discoveries in everyday life. His legend lives on and continues to inspire students of mathematics such as myself.
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