Srinivas Ramanujan’s Birth Date Is National Mathematics Day

Today is the birth anniversary of famed Mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan. The day is also recognized as National Mathematics Day to honor the legacy of this great Mathematician.

Here is everything you need to know about Srinivas Ramanujan:

1. Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu. He was born into an orthodox Iyengar Brahmin family.

2. By the age of 12, Ramanujan conquered the world of Trigonometry and started discovering his own theorems.

3. Ramanujan had no friends in school as he spent all his time studying Mathematics.

4. The Mathematics geek failed in all his subjects except for the subject of numbers.

5. Ramanujan was the only child in his family who managed to survive the small pox outbreak that took the lives of thousands in Tamil Nadu.

6. Ramanujan wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy as he was highly influenced by Hardy’s Order of Infinity. Hardy was impressed by Ramanujan’s Mathematics knowledge and invited him to England.

S. Ramanujan                                                                       G. H. Hardy 7. The weather in England did not suit Ramanujan and he fell terribly ill on his trip. Hardy had to take him to a hospital when a noteworthy incident took place. Ramanujan told Hardy the taxi he traveled in sported the number 1729. But Hardy responded with it’s just a boring number. But Ramanujan explained, “No, this is not a boring but a very interesting number. This is the smallest number which can be written in the form of a sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Ever since the number 1729 was called the Hardy-Ramanujan number.

8. Ramanujan was enlisted at the Trinity College, Cambridge in England where he took the first steps towards success.

9. In 1917, He was elected as a member of the London Mathematical Society. Ramanujan was one of the first Indians to be part of this prestigious society.

10. Ramanujan continued to taste success in 1918 when he was the youngest person to become a Fellow of the Royal Society.

11. Unfortunately, Ramanujan’s life was short lived. His health deteriorated as he could not adapt to the food and weather in London. He returned to India in 1919 and passed away on the 6th of April 1920. Ramanujan was only 32 years old but he proved passion and hard work beats the time we have on this planet.

Dev Patel starred as Ramanujan in a biopic titled The Man Who Knew Infinity. The film released in 2016 has Jeremy Irons acting as Hardy and directed by Matthew Brown.