The Legend

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was born into a poor family in the small town of Kumbakonam in India. Self-taught in mathematics, he worked in virtual isolation from other mathematicians. At the age of 25, he wrote a letter to G.H. Hardy, the leading British mathematician at the time, listing some of his discoveries. Hardy immediately recognized Ramanujan’s genius and for the next six years the two worked together in London until Ramanujan fell ill and returned to his hometown in India, where he died a year later. Ramanujan was a genius with phenomenal ability to see hidden patterns in the properties of numbers. Most of his discoveries were written as complicated infinite series, the importance of which was not recognized until many years after his death. In the last year of his life, he wrote 130 pages of mysterious formulas, many of which still defy proof. Hardy tells the story that when he visited Ramanujan in a hospital and arrived in a taxi, he remarked to Ramanujan that cab’s number, 1729, was uninteresting. Ramanujan replied “No, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways “