What was srinivasa ramanujan known for

He began developing his theories in mathematics and published his first paper in The field of number theory in mathematics was enriched with his intuitive research and his vast contribution. Sign up for a weekly brief collating many news items into one untangled thought delivered straight to your mailbox. Email address. Next Story Karnataka ready with cold chain system for Covaxin: Minister. Popular on BI. Latest Stories.

Ramanujan attended the local grammar school and high school and early on demonstrated an affinity for mathematics. When he was 15, he obtained an out-of-date book called A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics , Ramanujan set about feverishly and obsessively studying its thousands of theorems before moving on to formulate many of his own.

At the end of high school, the strength of his schoolwork was such that he obtained a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam. He lost his scholarship to both the Government College and later at the University of Madras because his devotion to math caused him to let his other courses fall by the wayside.

With little in the way of prospects, in he sought government unemployment benefits. Yet despite these setbacks, Ramanujan continued to make strides in his mathematical work, and in , published a page paper on Bernoulli numbers in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

Seeking the help of members of the society, in Ramanujan was able to secure a low-level post as a shipping clerk with the Madras Port Trust, where he was able to make a living while building a reputation for himself as a gifted mathematician. Around this time, Ramanujan had become aware of the work of British mathematician G. Hardy — who himself had been something of a young genius — with whom he began a correspondence in and shared some of his work.

The following year, Hardy convinced Ramanujan to come study with him at Cambridge. Ramanujan was awarded a bachelor of science degree for research from Cambridge in and became a member of the Royal Society of London in Together they began the powerful "circle method" to provide an exact formula for p n , the number of integer partitions of n.

The circle method has played a major role in subsequent developments in analytic number theory. This discovery led to extensive advances in the theory of modular forms. Bruce C. Berndt , Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, adds that: "the theory of modular forms is where Ramanujan's ideas have been most influential.

In the last year of his life, Ramanujan devoted much of his failing energy to a new kind of function called mock theta functions. Although after many years we can prove the claims that Ramanujan made, we are far from understanding how Ramanujan thought about them, and much work needs to be done.

The problem of finding p n was studied by Euler , who found a formula for the generating function of p n that is, for the infinite series whose n th term is p n x n. While this allows one to calculate p n recursively, it doesn't lead to an explicit formula. Hardy and Ramanujan came up with such a formula though they only proved it works asymptotically; Rademacher proved it gives the exact value of p n.

Ramanujan's years in England were mathematically productive, and he gained the recognition he hoped for. Cambridge granted him a Bachelor of Science degree "by research" in , and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society the first Indian to be so honored in But the alien climate and culture took a toll on his health.

Ramanujan had always lived in a tropical climate and had his mother later his wife to cook for him: now he faced the English winter, and he had to do all his own cooking to adhere to his caste's strict dietary rules.

Wartime shortages only made things worse. In he was hospitalized, his doctors fearing for his life. By late his health had improved; he returned to India in But his health failed again, and he died the next year.

Besides his published work, Ramanujan left behind several notebooks, which have been the object of much study. The English mathematician G. Watson wrote a long series of papers about them.

More recently the American mathematician Bruce C. Berndt has written a multi-volume study of the notebooks.