Interesting facts of Ramanujan

 some of the lesser known facts about Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan - The Man who knew Infinity.

• By the age of 13, he had completed adavanced trigonometry and discovered complex theorems on his own.
• He never had any friends in School because his peers rarely understood him at school & were always in awe of his mathematical acumen.
• When you were 17, you would probably be wondering about crushes and college applications. But at 17, Ramanujan had developed Bernoulli numbers and calculated Euler’s constant up to 15 decimal places.
• He used to complete his mathematics exam in just half of the allotted time.
• As a young man, he failed to get a degree , as he did not clear his fine art courses , although he performed exceptionally well in mathematics.
• He got married to a 10-year-old child bride Janaki, on July 14, 1909.
• Because paper was expensive , poor Ramanujan often used to derive his results on slates to jot down results of his derivations.
• In England when Ramanujan was ill, G H Hardy went to see him at Putney. Hardy took a taxicab with the number 1729. On arriving Hardy said to Ramanujan that the number was rather a dull one. To this, Ramanujan said that it was an interesting number and that it was the smallest number that can be expressed as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.

1729 = 1^3 + 12^3

1729 = 9^3 + 10^3

( His house in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu )

• During his short lifespan, Ramanujan was plagued by some disease or the other. Right after getting married, he developed a condition known as Hydrocele testies.
• He was a staunchly religious person with very pleasant manners. In Cambridge, he once said to Hardy, “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God”.
• Birthday of Ramanujan (December 22) is celebrated as “State IT Day” in Tamil Nadu. In 2011, the Indian Government declared his birthday as National Mathematics Day.
• On 22 Dec 2012 , 2012 was declared as National Mathematics Year in India by former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.
• In his last year of life, Ramanujan compiled some 600 mathematical formulae and listed them without any proof.
• On 13 October 1918, he became the first Indian to be elected as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
• The cultural difference eventually took a toll on his health. He was diagnosed with severe vitamin deficiency and TB. He then returned to India in 1919 and died the following year, at the young age of 32.

By Hungarian Mathematician PAUL ERDŐS:

Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100. Hardy gave himself a score of 25, Littlewood 30, Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.