Ramanujan was born in Tamil Nadu on December 22, 1887. His father was a gumasta and mother was a woman of great piety and devotion. He was a very quiet and thoughtful child who did not give much time to play or roam about with boys of his age. He learnt hymns, songs, read religious epics and devotional literature and could recite verses and slokas from the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Thirukural.
When he joined in a local school at Kumbhakonam at the age of five, the boys were under-struck at the peculiar bent of mind of Ramanujan and asked his help to solve problems. In 1894, he joined the town High school at Kumbhakonam. It was he who had prepared the time table for that school. The senior mathematics teacher Sir Ganapathy Subbier was aware of Ramanujan’s special ability and got the work done from him.
One interesting doubt by Ramanujan was, when his teacher was explaining any quantity divided by it was equal to unity, he stood up and asked if zero divided by zero was also equal to unity. How come no other student has this doubt but Ramanujan alone asked. He was an exceptional legend in the world of Mathematics. Though we know many other mathematicians he stood a step above them.
He never wrote any proof and reference. But after the publishing of a ‘Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics’ by George Shoo bridge Carr, Ramanujan started to work and write down theorems on sheets of paper, later known as Note-books, which have provided plenty of study materials for researchers in future. He was a Drashta (seer) in mathematics. Areas in which he concentrated are Magic squares, continued fractions, hyper-geometric series, and properties of numbers prime as well as composite, partition of numbers, elliptical integrals and mock theta functions.
Ramanujan’s life is like a glacier whose major part lies hidden below the surface and only a small section is visible above. He was a sadhak (a truth seeker) whose aim was to identify the Supreme through mathematics. His eyes were a mirror of his soul. He died at the age of 33.
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