The Man Who Knew Infinity

Michio Kaku aptly describes S. Ramanujan as seen through the eyes of his colleagues, “Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of Science.”

And indeed, as an autodidact, who never went through any education higher than secondary school, his giant footprint in the world of mathematics is particularly astounding.

Ramanujan was born in 22nd December 1887 in Erode, in Madras Presidency of British India. His father was a clerk in a Saree shop, and his mother was a traditional housewife. Ramanujan was an ardent student of Mathematics from a very young age, and so devoted that he failed in most other subjects, failing in his Fellow of Arts examination, which forced him to continue his research in extreme poverty and often on brink of starvation.

His reversal came when his superiors at Madras Port Trust, where he worked as a clerk, forwarded his work to eminent mathematicians of the day. After an initial round of refusals, finally Ramanujan received an invitation to come to England from mathematician G. H. Hardy. Hardy was so impressed by the mathematical theorems submitted by Ramanujan that he initially considered it to be a prank by fellow mathematician J. E. Littlewood.

He spent 5 years, from 1914-1919, working in Cambridge and opened up fields in mathematics whose importance was discovered decades later in various applications of Quantum Mechanics and String Theory. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, the second Indian to achieve so.

Ramanujan, due to his irregular education, was never bothered to provide rigorous proofs for his theorems. His formulas and theorems were derived from his insights into mathematics, which made his work often incomprehensible to his fellow mathematician. He had once commented, “An equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of God.” A deeply religious man, the comment is a very accurate approximation of his approach to mathematics.

His brilliance though, was short-lived. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and in 1919 returned to Madras, where he breathed his last in 1920.

Ramanujan was acclaimed in mathematical circle as a rare genius. His mentor and close friend G. H. Hardy, described Ramanujan as a mathematician of same calibre as Euler and Jacobi. J. E. Littlewood had said, “Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan’s personal friends.”

Ramanujan has been compared to a supernova than a meteor, his short career glowing brighter than the brightest mathematicians of his time. He opened up avenues of mathematics that were never thought of before in the world of mathematics, and a left an impression as indelible as that of Archimedes and Euler.