Srinivasa Ramanujan was a brilliant Indian mathematician recognised as one of history’s greatest mathematical geniuses.1 Though he had virtually no formal training in advanced mathematics, his deep intuition led him to make extraordinary contributions to number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, significantly reshaping 20th-century mathematics.2
🌟 Quick Wiki / Essential Details
| Particular | Detail |
| Full Name | Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar |
| Famous As | The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Mathematical Genius |
| Date of Birth | December 22, 1887 |
| Place of Birth | Erode, Tamil Nadu, British India |
| Date of Death | April 26, 1920 |
| Age at Death | 32 Years |
| Primary Occupation | Self-taught Mathematician, Clerk (briefly) |
| Collaboration | G. H. Hardy (British Mathematician) |
| Key Honors | Fellow of the Royal Society (1918), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1918) |
| Legacy Day | National Mathematics Day (December 22) in India |
👨👩👧👦 Family & Personal Life
Ramanujan was born into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family of modest means.3
| Relationship | Name | Note |
| Father | Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar | Clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop. |
| Mother | Komalatammal | Housewife; taught him traditional and religious songs. |
| Wife | S. Janaki Ammal (m. 1909) | Their marriage was arranged when she was ten years old. |
| Community/Beliefs | Tamil Brahmin Iyengar, Hindu | He maintained a strict vegetarian diet, which complicated his stay in England during WWI. |
Note on Physical Stats (Height, Weight): Precise, officially recorded data for his Height and Weight are not publicly available. He was described as a “short uncouth figure, stout, unshaven, not over clean” by an early supporter in India.4 His health greatly deteriorated in England, leading to severe emaciation before his death.
➗ Major Mathematical Contributions
Despite having limited formal education (he lost scholarships for failing non-mathematical subjects), Ramanujan developed his theories largely through self-study, notably after discovering G. S. Carr’s book, A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics 5
| Contribution | Field of Study | Description |
| Partition Function $p(n)$ | Number Theory | Developed the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic formula to approximate the number of ways an integer can be expressed as a sum of positive integers. |
| Mock Theta Functions | Modular Forms | Described these functions in his last letter to Hardy; they are now extremely useful in Quantum Field Theory and String Theory, including predicting the entropy of black holes. |
| Infinite Series for $\pi$ | Mathematical Analysis | Found a highly efficient formula for the infinite series for pi, which forms the basis of many modern algorithms used to calculate $\pi$ to trillions of decimal places. |
| Hardy-Ramanujan Number | Number Theory | 1729, which he famously recognised as the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways ($1^3 + 12^3$ and $9^3 + 10^3$). |
| Master Theorem | Analytic Function Theory | A powerful technique used to evaluate definite integrals and infinite series. |
💔 Illness and Death
Ramanujan’s health suffered greatly while in England due to the cold climate, isolation, and an inadequate diet (as a strict vegetarian during WWI).6 He was in and out of sanitariums, diagnosed with tuberculosis.7 He returned to India in 1919, but his health worsened, and he died at age 32.8 Later medical consensus suggests the likely cause of death was hepatic amoebiasis, caused by liver parasites common in Madras at the time, which was often misdiagnosed as tuberculosis 9
