A clerk with no degree, who mailed a stranger the mathematics of a century — and was right.
In 1913, a shipping clerk in Madras posted a letter to Cambridge crammed with theorems no one had seen before — some famous results rediscovered alone, some so strange the great G. H. Hardy said they "must be true, because no one would have the imagination to invent them." Srinivasa Ramanujan had almost no formal training. He had failed out of college twice because he could think of nothing but mathematics. And from a single second-hand book of formulas, working on a slate to save paper, he had reconstructed and then overtaken much of the field.
He lived only thirty-two years. In them he produced nearly four thousand results, many of which mathematicians are still proving — and using — a century later.
A short, blazing life
The lifeline
1887
Born in Erode, raised in the temple town of Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu
1903
Devours Carr's book of 5,000 formulas — and teaches himself the rest
1913
Writes to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge; the letter changes both their lives
1914
Sails to England to work with Hardy through the war years
1918
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, among the youngest ever
1920
Dies at 32 in India, still filling pages with new mathematics
By the numbers
The measure of him
32
Years he lived — from Kumbakonam to Cambridge and back
~3,900
Results and identities he recorded, many unproven for decades
1729
The "taxicab" number he named from a sickbed as remarkable
1918
Elected F.R.S. at 30 — one of the first Indians so honoured
What he gave mathematics
The work
Partitions
The Hardy–Ramanujan formula for how many ways a number can be split into sums — a founding result of analytic number theory.
1 / π
Rapidly-converging series for π that still power record-breaking high-precision computations today.
1920
Mock theta functions, described in his final letter — barely understood in his lifetime, now central to modern mathematics and physics.
1729
The smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two ways: 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³. Now called a taxicab number.
Overlooked, then immortal
Recognition
In his lifetime
Lost his college scholarship — he would study nothing but mathematics
His first letters to English mathematicians went unanswered
Worked as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust to support himself
Isolated and ill through cold Cambridge winters, far from home
Today
His birthday, 22 December, is India's National Mathematics Day
The "lost notebook," found in 1976, still yields new research
Constants and theorems carry his name across mathematics
Told for the world in books and the film The Man Who Knew Infinity
From temple town to Trinity
Kumbakonam
He grew up in a Brahmin household in Kumbakonam, a town of temples in the Kaveri delta, and credited the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal with revealing formulas to him in dreams. From there — with no passport to the world of European mathematics but his own notebooks — he reached Trinity College, Cambridge.
2
Notebooks he filled by hand before ever leaving India
8,000+
Kilometres from Kumbakonam to Cambridge
1729
The number that turned a taxi ride into legend
"An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
— Srinivasa Ramanujan
