Srinivasa Ramanujan was born at his grandmother’s house in Erode, a small town located about 400 km towards southwest Madras. His father was a clerk in a textile shop in Kumbakonam. Young Ramanujan contracted small pox in 1889 December. However, unlike many other people in that town, Ramanujan overcame the epidemic invasion even thoughhis family his father’s income was barely sufficient to meet extra medical expenses. When he was five, he was sent to a primary school in Kumbakonam. Before he entered the Town High school in Kumbakonam in 1898 January, he went to several other private schools. While in school, he excelled in all the subjects and was considered as an all-rounder. Towards 1900, he began to work towards developing his mathematical ability, dealing with geometrics and arithmetic series.
Regarded as ‘natural genius’ by the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, Srinivasa Ramanujan displayed an amazing talent in mathematics, even though he did not receive formal training in that subject. He contributed to several areas of mathematics such as the number theory, mathematical analysis, infinite series and continued fractions. This great mathematician of the 20th century added much to the field of advance mathematics with his fascinating theories and proofs, which are in use even today. Also, in 1997, ‘The Ramanujan Journal’ was published by an American mathematician Bruce .C. Berndt, which showed Ramanujan’s areas of study. He formulated many formulas to solve problems, but his untimely death put an end to his great exploration to the unseen beauty and enormity of this subject.
His talent was exposed to the world very early in 1902, when he showed how to solve cubic equations and also sought a method to solve quartic. While in Town High School, he read a book ‘Synopsis of elementary results in mathematics’, which was very concise that he could teach himself without taking help from any tutor. In this book, various theorems were mentioned in the book, along with shortcuts and formulas to solve them. During this time, Ramanujan engaged himself in deep research in 1904 and during this time he investigated the series ‘sigma 1/n’ and also extended Euler’s constant to 15 decimal points. Because of his great work in school studies, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Government College in Kumbakonam, in 1904. Due to his lack of interest in other subjects, he could not utilize this opportunity properly. He kept up his mathematical works and studied in depth about hyper geometric series and the relationship between series and integrals.
0 comments:
Post a Comment