I was struck by the extraordinary mathematical results contained in [the notebooks]. I had no mind to smother his genius by an appointment in the lowest rungs of the revenue department.
The number 1729 is known as the Hardy–Ramanujan number after a famous visit by Hardy to see Ramanujan at a hospital. In Hardy's words:
To supplement Hardy's endorsement, Gilbert Walker, a former mathematical lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, looked at Ramanujan's work and expressed amazement, urging the young man to spend time at Cambridge. As a result of Walker's endorsement, B. Hanumantha Rao, a mathematics professor at an engineering college, invited Ramanujan's colleague Narayana Iyer to a meeting of the Board of Studies in Mathematics to discuss "what we can do for S. Ramanujan". The board agreed to grant Ramanujan a research scholarship of 75 rupees per month for the next two years at the University of Madras. While he was engaged as a research student, Ramanujan continued to submit papers to the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. In one instance, Narayana Iyer submitted some of Ramanujan's theorems on summation of series to the journal, adding, "The following theorem is due to S. Ramanujan, the mathematics student of Madras University." Later in November, British Professor Edward B. Ross of Madras Christian College, whom Ramanujan had met a few years before, stormed into his class one day with his eyes glowing, asking his students, "Does Ramanujan know Polish?" The reason was that in one paper, Ramanujan had anticipated the work of a Polish Mathematician whose paper had just arrived in the day's mail. In his quarterly papers, Ramanujan drew up theorems to make definite integrals more easily solvable. Working off Giuliano Frullani's 1821 integral theorem, Ramanujan formulated generalisations that could be made to evaluate formerly unyielding integrals.
The first result had already been determined by G. Bauer in 1859. The second was new to Hardy, and was derived from a class of functions called hypergeometric series, which had first been researched by Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Hardy found these results "much more intriguing" than Gauss's work on integrals. After seeing Ramanujan's theorems on continued fractions on the last page of the manuscripts, Hardy commented that the theorems "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before". He figured that Ramanujan's theorems "must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them". Hardy asked a colleague, J. E. Littlewood, to take a look at the papers. Littlewood was amazed by Ramanujan's genius. After discussing the papers with Littlewood, Hardy concluded that the letters were "certainly the most remarkable I have received" and said that Ramanujan was "a Mathematician of the highest quality, a man of altogether exceptional originality and power". One colleague, E. H. Neville, later remarked that "not one [theorem] could have been set in the most advanced mathematical examination in the world".
Ramanujan (literally, "younger brother of Rama", a Hindu deity) was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu), at the residence of his maternal grandparents. His father, K. Srinivasa Iyengar, originally from Thanjavur district, worked as a clerk in a sari shop. His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and also sang at a local temple. They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam. The family home is now a museum. When Ramanujan was a year and a half old, his mother gave birth to a son, Sadagopan, who died less than three months later. In December 1889, Ramanujan contracted smallpox, though he recovered, unlike 4,000 others who would die in a bad year in the Thanjavur district around this time. He moved with his mother to her parents' house in Kanchipuram, near Madras (now Chennai). His mother gave birth to two more children, in 1891 and 1894, both failing to reach their first birthdays.
On 1 October 1892, Ramanujan was enrolled at the local school. After his maternal grandfather lost his job as a court official in Kanchipuram, Ramanujan and his mother moved back to Kumbakonam and he was enrolled in the Kangayan Primary School. When his paternal grandfather died, he was sent back to his maternal grandparents, then living in Madras. He did not like school in Madras, and tried to avoid attending. His family enlisted a local constable to make sure the boy attended school. Within six months, Ramanujan was back in Kumbakonam.
In 1903, when he was 16, Ramanujan obtained from a friend a library copy of a A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, G. S. Carr's collection of 5,000 theorems. Ramanujan reportedly studied the contents of the book in detail. The book is generally acknowledged as a key element in awakening his genius. The next year, Ramanujan independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places. His peers at the time commented that they "rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe" of him.
When he graduated from Town Higher Secondary School in 1904, Ramanujan was awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school's headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. Iyer introduced Ramanujan as an outstanding student who deserved scores higher than the maximum. He received a scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but was so intent on mathematics that he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process. In August 1905, Ramanujan ran away from home, heading towards Visakhapatnam, and stayed in Rajahmundry for about a month. He later enrolled at Pachaiyappa's College in Madras. There he passed in mathematics, choosing only to attempt questions that appealed to him and leaving the rest unanswered, but performed poorly in other subjects, such as English, physiology and Sanskrit. Ramanujan failed his Fellow of Arts exam in December 1906 and again a year later. Without a FA degree, he left college and continued to pursue independent research in mathematics, living in extreme poverty and often on the brink of starvation.
On 14 July 1909, Ramanujan married Janaki (Janakiammal) (21 March 1899 – 13 April 1994), a girl whom his mother had selected for him a year earlier and who was ten years old when they married. It was not unusual for marriages to be arranged with girls. She came from Rajendram, a village close to Marudur (Karur district) Railway Station. Ramanujan's father did not participate in the marriage ceremony. As was Common at that time, Janaki Ammal continued to stay at her maternal home for three years after marriage till she attained puberty. In 1912, she and Ramanujan's mother joined Ramanujan in Madras.
In late 1910, Ramanujan was sick again. He feared for his health, and told his friend R. Radakrishna Iyer to "hand [his notebooks] over to Professor Singaravelu Mudaliar [the mathematics professor at Pachaiyappa's College] or to the British professor Edward B. Ross, of the Madras Christian College." After Ramanujan recovered and retrieved his notebooks from Iyer, he took a train from Kumbakonam to Villupuram, a city under French control. In 1912, Ramanujan moved to a house in Saiva Muthaiah Mudali street, George Town, Madras with his wife and mother where they lived for a few months. In May 1913, upon securing a research position at Madras University, Ramanujan moved with his family to Triplicane.
In his 17-page paper, "Some Properties of Bernoulli's Numbers" (1911), Ramanujan gave three proofs, two corollaries and three conjectures. Ramanujan's writing initially had many flaws. As Journal Editor M. T. Narayana Iyengar noted:
In a letter dated 9 February 1912, Ramanujan wrote:
On 8 February 1913, Hardy wrote Ramanujan a letter expressing his interest in his work, adding that it was "essential that I should see proofs of some of your assertions". Before his letter arrived in Madras during the third week of February, Hardy contacted the Indian Office to plan for Ramanujan's trip to Cambridge. Secretary Arthur Davies of the Advisory Committee for Indian Students met with Ramanujan to discuss the overseas trip. In accordance with his Brahmin upbringing, Ramanujan refused to leave his country to "go to a foreign land". Meanwhile, he sent Hardy a letter packed with theorems, writing, "I have found a friend in you who views my labour sympathetically."
Throughout his life, Ramanujan was plagued by health problems. His health worsened in England; possibly he was also less resilient due to the difficulty of keeping to the strict dietary requirements of his religion in England and wartime rationing during 1914–1918. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency at the time, and was confined to a sanatorium. In 1919 he returned to Kumbakonam, Madras Presidency, and soon thereafter, in 1920, died at the age of 32. After his death, his brother Tirunarayanan chronicled Ramanujan's remaining handwritten notes consisting of formulae on singular moduli, hypergeometric series and continued fractions and compiled them.
In his book Scientific Edge, the Physicist Jayant Narlikar spoke of "Srinivasa Ramanujan, discovered by the Cambridge Mathematician Hardy, whose great mathematical findings were beginning to be appreciated from 1915 to 1919. His achievements were to be fully understood much later, well after his untimely death in 1920. For Example, his work on the highly composite numbers (numbers with a large number of factors) started a whole new line of investigations in the theory of such numbers."
Ramanujan was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree by research (this degree was later renamed PhD) in March 1916 for his work on highly composite numbers, the first part of which was published as a paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. The paper was more than 50 pages and proved various properties of such numbers. Hardy remarked that it was one of the most unusual papers seen in mathematical research at that time and that Ramanujan showed extraordinary ingenuity in handling it. On 6 December 1917, he was elected to the London Mathematical Society. In 1918 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the second Indian admitted to the Royal Society, following Ardaseer Cursetjee in 1841. At age 31 Ramanujan was one of the youngest Fellows in the history of the Royal Society. He was elected "for his investigation in Elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers." On 13 October 1918, he was the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1918 Hardy and Ramanujan studied the partition function P(n) extensively. They gave a non-convergent asymptotic series that permits exact computation of the number of partitions of an integer. Hans Rademacher, in 1937, was able to refine their formula to find an exact convergent series solution to this Problem. Ramanujan and Hardy's work in this area gave rise to a powerful new method for finding asymptotic formulae called the circle method.
In 1919, ill health – now believed to have been hepatic amoebiasis (a complication from episodes of dysentery many years previously) – compelled Ramanujan's return to India, where he died in 1920 at the age of 32. His last letters to Hardy, written January 1920, show that he was still continuing to produce new mathematical ideas and theorems. His "lost notebook", containing discoveries from the last year of his life, caused great excitement among mathematicians when it was rediscovered in 1976.
In his obituary of Ramanujan which he wrote for Nature in 1920, Hardy observed Ramanujan's work primarily involved fields less known even amongst other pure mathematicians, concluding:
Ramanujan's widow, Smt. Janaki Ammal, moved to Bombay; in 1931 she returned to Madras and settled in Triplicane, where she supported herself on a pension from Madras University and income from tailoring. In 1950, she adopted a son, W. Narayanan, who eventually became an officer of the State Bank of India and raised a family. In her later years, she was granted a lifetime pension from Ramanujan's former employer, the Madras Port Trust, and was also granted pensions from, among others, the Indian National Science Academy and the state governments of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. She continued to cherish Ramanujan's memory, and was active in efforts towards increasing his public recognition; prominent mathematicians, including George Andrews, Bruce C. Berndt and Béla Bollobás made it a point to visit her while in India. She died at her Triplicane residence in 1994.
Although there are numerous statements that could have borne the name Ramanujan conjecture, there is one that was highly influential on later work. In particular, the connection of this conjecture with conjectures of André Weil in algebraic geometry opened up new areas of research. That Ramanujan conjecture is an assertion on the size of the tau-function, which has as generating function the discriminant modular form Δ(q), a typical cusp form in the theory of modular forms. It was finally proven in 1973, as a consequence of Pierre Deligne's proof of the Weil conjectures. The reduction step involved is complicated. Deligne won a Fields Medal in 1978 for that work.
The first notebook has 351 pages with 16 somewhat organised chapters and some unorganised material. The second notebook has 256 pages in 21 chapters and 100 unorganised pages, with the third notebook containing 33 unorganised pages. The results in his notebooks inspired numerous papers by later mathematicians trying to prove what he had found. Hardy himself created papers exploring material from Ramanujan's work, as did G. N. Watson, B. M. Wilson, and Bruce Berndt. A fourth notebook with 87 unorganised pages, the so-called "lost notebook", was rediscovered in 1976 by George Andrews.
A 1994 analysis of Ramanujan's medical records and symptoms by Dr. D. A. B. Young concluded that his medical symptoms—including his past relapses, fevers, and hepatic conditions—were much closer to those resulting from hepatic amoebiasis, an illness then widespread in Madras, rather than tuberculosis. He had two episodes of dysentery before he left India. When not properly treated, dysentery can lie dormant for years and lead to hepatic amoebiasis, whose diagnosis was not then well established. At the time, if properly diagnosed, amoebiasis was a treatable and often curable disease; for instance, British Soldiers who had contracted the disease during the First World War were being successfully cured of amoebiasis around the time Ramanujan left England.
Since Ramanujan's father was at work most of the day, his mother took care of the boy as a child. He had a close relationship with her. From her, he learned about tradition and puranas. He learned to sing religious songs, to attend pujas at the temple, and to maintain particular eating habits – all of which are part of Brahmin culture. At the Kangayan Primary School, Ramanujan performed well. Just before turning 10, in November 1897, he passed his primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography and arithmetic with the best scores in the district. That year, Ramanujan entered Town Higher Secondary School, where he encountered formal mathematics for the first time.
Hardy cites Ramanujan as remarking that all religions seemed equally true to him. Hardy further argued that Ramanujan's religious belief had been romanticised by Westerners and overstated—in reference to his belief, not practice—by Indian biographers. At the same time, he remarked on Ramanujan's strict vegetarianism.
