Ramanujan, Srinivasa

Ramanujan, Srinivasa (shrē'nĭvä`sə rämä`njən), 1889–1920, Indian mathematician. He was a self-taught genius in pure mathematics who made original contributions to function theory, power series, and number theory with the training gained from a single textbook. He was invited to Cambridge by G. H. Hardy, with whom he collaborated, and continued there his work in number theory. He died of tuberculosis.

Bibliography

See R. Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991).

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Ramanujan, Srinivasa (Aaiyangar)

(born Dec. 22, 1887, Erode, India—died April 26, 1920, Kumbakonam) Indian mathematician. Extremely poor, he was largely self-taught from age 15. In 1913 he began a correspondence with Godfrey H. Hardy (1877–1947) that took him to England, where he made advances, especially in the theory of numbers, the partition of numbers, and the theory of continued fractions. He published papers in English and European journals, and in 1918 he became the first Indian elected to the Royal Society of London. He died of tuberculosis at age 32, generally unknown but recognized by mathematicians as a phenomenal genius.

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Ramanujan, Srinivasa 

Born Dec. 22, 1887, in Erode, southern India; died Apr. 26, 1920, near Madras. Indian mathematician.

Although Ramanujan lacked any special mathematical training, he obtained remarkable results in number theory. His most significant study, written with G. Hardy, was on the asymptotic behavior of the function p(n)—the number of ways the number n can be written as a sum of positive terms.

REFERENCE

Levin, V. I. “Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo indiiskogo matematika S. Ramanudzhana.” Istoriko-matematicheskie issledovaniia, issue 13, pp. 333–78, 1960. (Contains bibliography.)