Dear All,
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid
tribute to mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887- 1920), on the occasion of
125th birth anniversary. He announced that his birthday - December 22 - would be
a National Mathematics Day.
Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26
April 1920) was an Indian mathematician, who made extraordinary contributions
to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued
fractions. Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly
identities and equations). His work continues to inspire mathematicians even
today!
Srinivasa Ramanujan, born into a poor Brahmin
family at Erode on Dec. 22, 1887, attended school in nearby Kumbakonam. By the
time he was 13, he could solve unaided every problem in Loney's Trigonometry,
and at 14 he obtained the theorems for the sine and the cosine that had been
anticipated by L. Euler.
Ramanujan became so absorbed in mathematics
that when he entered the local government college in 1904 with a merit scholarship,
he neglected his other subjects and lost the scholarship. Ramanujan married in
1909, and while working as a clerk he continued his mathematical
investigations.
In January 1913 Ramanujan sent some of his
work to G. H. Hardy, Cayley lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge. Hardy noticed
that Ramanujan had rediscovered, and gone far beyond, some of the latest
conclusions of Western mathematicians.
In 1914 Ramanujan went to Cambridge. The
university experience gave him considerable sophistication, but intuition still
played a more important role than argument. In Hardy's opinion, if Ramanujan's
gift had been recognized early, he could have become one of the greatest mathematicians
of all time. His patience, memory, power of calculation, and intuition made him
the greatest formalist of his day.
In 1918 Ramanujan was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
However, the story goes that, Ramanujan’s
health deteriorated greatly while he was in England, and he eventually had to
travel back to India in 1919. He died a year later, when he was only 33 years
of age, although his work will be remembered for a long time. He dealt with Riemann
series, the elliptic integrals, hyper geometric series, and functional
equations of the zeta function. Hardy liked to rank mathematicians on a scale
of 1 to 100, and he gave himself 25, Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80, and
Ramanujan 100, which shows just how great Ramanujan was.
Edu-Club
CRPF Public School, Rohini
