Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Man Who Knew Infinity

Image via ThoughtCo.: Portrait of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems that were considered unsolvable.

Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: according to Hans Eysenck: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered".

Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognizing Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before", and some recently proven but highly advanced results.

During his short life, he has developed close to 3,900 results in the form of identities and equations. It is impossible to select one work that shines above all, but his derivation of the partition function in number theory has had a profound influence on the history of mathematics. For many years people had tried to develop a formula for counting partitions. One major work Ramanujan and Hardy brought out was an expression that gives the exact computation of partitions of an integer. Ramanujan was the first Indian scientist to be accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, a top honour given by the British scientific establishment.

Image via Trinity College Library, Cambridge: A sheet from the ‘Lost Notebook’ via Trinity College Library, Cambridge