Harish Sharma
Born on 22nd December, 1887 in the town of Erode in Tamil Nadu, Ramanujan was largely self -taught and emerged from poverty to become one of the most influential mathematicians of 20th century. He cultivated his love for Mathematics single in total isolation. He had a prodigious memory, and at his school level he use to entertain his friends by his mathematical skills.This was the fore shadow of what was to come.
At the age of 8, Ramanujan constructed a magic square
22 12 18 87
40 65 31 3
71 15 28 25
6 47 62 24
This magic square showing his date of birth in the first row. He was friend of numbers.
At the age of 12 he solved the book of SL Loney on plane trigonometry. That book was compilation of 6165 theorems without proofs.That book was not remarkable book but Ramanujan made it remarkable. That book was largely used by students of Carr who were preparing for the entrance examination of in mathematics at Cambridge University.
In 1903 Ramanujan entered the Government college in Kumbakonam. Unfortunately, he failed in the examination since he neglected his non mathematical studies, Four years latter he entered another college in Channi and the same thing happened. Finally in 1912 he secured a job as a clerk in Madras Port Trust Office.There his duties were light and so he could continue his work in mathematics. Manager of the office, S N Aiyar was also a mathematician he supported and encouraged him a lot to move ahead in the field of mathematics. It was he who suggested him to write to GH Hardy, a famous mathematician at Trinity college in England.
In his famous 1913 letter to Hardy, Ramanujan attached 120 theorems as a representative sample of his work. It took over two hours for Hardy to analyse the letter to determine if it was written by a crank or a genius. He consulted with is eminent colleague JE Littlewood and finally concluded that it was written by a genius.with the approval of Prof Hardy, Ramanujan was invited to England.
Ramanujan sailed to England in March 1914, Ramnujan published more than 30 research papers from 1914 to 1917. The most notable of these collaborations involved the the partition of the function.This function counts the number of ways a natural number can be decomposed into smaller parts. Hardy and Ramanujan developed a new method, now called the circle method, to derive an asymptotic formula for this function. This method is now one of the central tools of analytic number theory and was largely responsible for major advances in the 20th century.
Another fundamental paper of Hardy and Ramanujan concerns what is now called the normal order method this method analyses the behaviour of additive arithmetical functions.
In 1916 Ramnujan’s paper created a sensation by heralding the development of the theory of modular forms, his last letter to Hardy, written literally on his death bed in 1920 outlining a new theory of “Mock theta functions” is now creating a greater sensation in the development of 21st century mathematics.
I hope that it is not hard for you to imagine what the example of Ramanujan could have provided for young men and women of those times, beginning to look at the world with increasingly different perceptions. The fact that Ramanujan’s early years were spent in a scientifically sterile atmosphere, that his life in India was not without hardships.
However ,the under circumstances that appeared to most Indians as nothing short of miraculous, he had gone to Cambridge , supported by eminent mathematicians and had returned to India with every assurance that he would be considered in time as one of the most original mathematician of the century. These facts are enough, more than enough, for aspiring young Indian students to break their bonds of intellectual confinement and perhaps soar the way that Ramanujan did.
(The author is teacher Govt. Girls HSS, Sheesh Mahal Poonch)
