Srinivasa Ramanujan Biography 
Srinivasa Ramanujan was the famous Indian mathematician and autodidact. He made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, infinite series, continued fractions and number theory. He was born on 22nd December 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu in a poor Brahmin family. He mastered the books on advanced trigonometry at the age of 12 and he devised theorems on his own. He conducted his mathematical research when he was 17 on Bernoulli numbers and Euler Mascheroni constant.
His parents are K. Srinivasa Iyengar and Komalatammal. All his siblings died in their infancy and he was affected by small pox in his younger days. He was enrolled at the local school on 1st October 1892 and he was moved to a Telugu medium school in March 1894. After the death of his paternal grandfather he was sent back to his maternal grandparents in Madras. He avoided attending school. When he was 11, he exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who stayed at his home. He studied the book, A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics.
He studied at Town Higher Secondary School in 1904 and was awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by his school headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. He received scholarship to study at Government Arts College at Kumbakonam. He enrolled at Pachaiyappa’s College later on. He failed in Fine Arts degree exam and left college without a degree.
He married nine year old bride Janaki Ammal on 14th July 1909. After the marriage, he was suffering from hydrocele testis and got operated in January 1910. Then he searched for a job and looked for a clerical position. He tutored some students at Presidency College who were preparing for F. A. Exams. He was sick again in 1910 and recovered later.
He went to London on 17th March 1914 and he was welcomed there to begin his work with Littlewood and Hardy. He worked on highly composite numbers and published this in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. He was elected to the London Mathematical Society on 6th December 1917 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918. He was affected by tuberculosis and vitamin deficiency and returned back to India in 1919 and died at the age of 32. His widow S. Janaki Ammal lived in Chennai and died in 1994.
Published: N/A
Updated: October 12, 2017
