As India celebrates Ramanujan's contribution on National Mathematics Day, here's a look at his life
Most kids have had Maths phobia and have seen siblings & friends go through the same dilemma. Here's why: it freaks us out when we cannot find the perfect value of X and Y. There seems to be just one way of doing these sums and if the final answer is off, the entire sum is wrong. And getting mathematical questions wrong is often looked at with disgrace and causes us to feel ashamed and small.
We often ran away from these problems (literally) because we could not, for the love of God, figure out the value of X and Y. And we could not care less if the lines on the graph were formed or not or if the point was on the X or Y axis or not.
Though Math did not come naturally to most of us, it did so to one man. And it made him a Superhuman genius. You might remember the 2015 movie based on Ramanujan, “The Man Who Knew Infinity”.
FYI - “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is on Netflix. Stars Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons pic.twitter.com/qP0p9UmbGC
— Rebecca Theodore-Vachon (@FilmFatale_NYC) April 28, 2018
THE GENIUS
Srinivas Ramanujan was a math prodigy who conquered math analysis. His contribution to mathematics in his short life is finding applications even today. His work in fields like Elliptical functions, Analysis, Number Theory, Continued fractions, Theta functions, and Blackhole theory has given him a stature like none other and made him like Einstein.
Photo : FB
Ramanujan was born on 22 Dec 1887 (about 134 years back) in a small town called Erode, Tamil Nadu, and was a self-taught mathematician. Math was like ABC to him. He did not like going to school as he often got so involved in math that he forgot about the other subjects. He learned from older college students, and in his teen years, he solved every possible college-level problem. At 15, he developed his theorems at his home.
At the age of 16, he came across a life-changing book by G. S. Carr. It was a collection of 5000 theorems called ''A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics''. This book is said to be a trigger for his seer-like knowing. But as the paper was expensive, he did his derivations on a slate and marked all important results on his notebook.
TIME AT CAMBRIDGE
Ramanujan’s first letter to G.H. Hardy reminds me of the difficulties faced by independent, often self-taught researchers working their way into the scientific research community.https://t.co/Gu8ohopRno pic.twitter.com/eDKbXo066j
— hardmaru (@hardmaru) January 13, 2020
''Orders of Infinity'' was another inspirational book for Ramanujan which inspired him to send his work to Cambridge. Renowned mathematician GH Hardy initially looked at the 26-year-old lad with suspicion and thought he was a fraud. But soon, Ramanujan was invited to move to Cambridge. He rediscovered about 100 years of western mathematics during his time at Cambridge on his own, but it was of no use since it was already out there. He did a Ph.D. on Highly Composite numbers and quickly earned the title of the most renowned mathematician at Cambridge. He collaborated with well-known mathematicians, worked on his research, and subsequently became the youngest elected Fellow of the Royal Society. He was the first Indian Fellow of the Trinity College, Cambridge.
DIVINE SUPPORT
But the man was not all logic. Instead, he was a mix of intuition and devotion that brought logic to his math. He dreamt of things and then took a leap of faith based on his dreams. He openly mentioned to his mentors and colleagues about a family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal, would appear in his dreams. He would dream about droplets of blood first, and then complex mathematical content would unfold in front of his closed eyes. He would wake up and then write them down. Ramanujan was an observant Hindu, who was adept at dream interpretation and astrology. He grew up to worship Namagiri, the Hindu Goddess of creativity. He often treated mathematics and spirituality as one and treated zero as Absolute Reality. Infinity represented the many manifestations of that Reality.
“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”
AN UNFORTUNATE END
Ramanujan tried to maintain his Brahmin diet along with long hours of study, but it could not sustain his health in the British climate. He was hospitalized in Cambridge and at the age of 29, was diagnosed with severe vitamin illness. He returned to India in 1919 and died in 1920 at the age of 32. He died due to hepatic amoebiasis. Since doctors had little awareness of hepatic amoebiasis, the world lost a genius at such a young age.
HIS LEGACY THAT IS STILL DISCOVERED TODAY
- Ramanujan left 3 notebooks as a legacy which covers 3900 equations, summaries and results which are still being derived as on today as his derivation then was not documented on paper. His books are the tools that Physicists are using today to understand the universe and its objects like black holes. Some of his work was only rederived by experts in 1970's and 1980's and his work was found to link String Theory and Black Holes. Some of his work on black holes written in 1920 was understood in 2002 using the work of Sander Zwegers.
FYI - “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is on Netflix. Stars Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons pic.twitter.com/qP0p9UmbGC
— Rebecca Theodore-Vachon (@FilmFatale_NYC) April 28, 2018
2. Ramanujan's Partition theory is in use everyday.
Do you know when you put your debit card in ATM and ask for money. The ATM arranges the money before giving it to you using Srinivasa Ramanujan’s partition theory. Today is his birth anniversary. Celebrated as #NationalMathematicsDay.
— Parveen Kaswan, IFS (@ParveenKaswan) December 22, 2021
3. Nikhil Srivastav will be awarded a prize in Jan 2022 for working on the Kadison Singer problem and the Ramanujan graphs.
4. Neena Gupta won the prestigious Ramanujan Prize 2021 for her work on Zariski's problem.
Considering his life journey, don't you think he deserves to be celebrated more?