SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN

Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 26 April 1920) was an

Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal
training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to
mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series,
and continued fractions. Ramanujan initially developed his own
mathematical research in isolation, which was quickly recognized by
Indian mathematicians. When his skills became apparent to the wider
mathematical community, centered in Europe at the time, he began a
famous partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy. He
rediscovered previously known theorems in addition to producing new
work. Ramanujan was said to be a natural genius, in the same league
as mathematicians such as Euler and Gauss.
During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900
results (mostly identities and equations). Nearly all his claims have
now been proven correct, although a small number of these results were actually false and some were already
known. He stated results that were both original and highly unconventional, such as the Ramanujan prime and
the Ramanujan theta function, and these have inspired a vast amount of further research. The Ramanujan
Journal, an international publication, was launched to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by his
work.

Attention towards mathematics

Ramanujan continued his mathematical research with Rao's financial aid taking care of his daily needs. Ramanujan,
with the help of Ramaswamy Aiyer, had his work published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.
One of the first problems he posed in the journal was:

He waited for a solution to be offered in three issues, over six months, but failed to receive any. At the end,
Ramanujan supplied the solution to the problem himself. On page 105 of his first notebook, he formulated an
equation that could be used to solve the infinitely nested radicals problem.

Using this equation, the answer to the question posed in the Journal was simply 3.[43] Ramanujan wrote his
first formal paper for the Journal on the properties of Bernoulli numbers. One property he discovered was
that the denominators (sequence A027642 in OEIS) of the fractions of Bernoulli numbers were always
divisible by six. He also devised a method of calculating Bn based on previous Bernoulli numbers. One of
these methods went as follows:
It will be observed that if n is even but not equal to zero,
(i) Bn is a fraction and the numerator of

in its lowest terms is a prime number,

(ii) the denominator of Bn contains each of the factors 2 and 3 once and only once,
(iii)

is an integer and

consequently is an odd integer.

The Mathematical Style of Ramanujan

Ramanujan's style of doing mathematics developed from his introduction to higher mathematics through
trigonometry and Carr's volume of six thousand theorems. In trigonometry one can derive multitudes of formulas
(identities). Ramanujan looked for such formulas as he saw in Carr's volume. Ramanujan generated formulas which
he felt to be true on the basis of intuition and the checking of some special cases. He generally did not provide a
rigorous proof of his results. Generally he was not strong in establishing such rigorous proofs.
Ramanujan for example looked for the limits of infinite series. One such series became the preferred way of
computing the mathematical constant .

For k=0 the result is 3.14159273, for k=1 it is 3.141592654. The value of to 14 decimal places is
3.141592653589793, so Ramanujan's formula provided a result accurate to 9 places on the second step. Altogether
Ramanujan had 17 series formulas for the reciprocal of . There is no way anyone could have created such a
formula without a touch of genius.
Ramanujan had a special interest in continued fractions; i.e., effectively infinite fractional constructions. For
examples of the evaluation of infinite series and continued fractions see Series and Fractions.
Later Ramanujan evaluated definite integrals. In modern times computer software such as Maple and Mathematical
have been created to do such evaluations. These software packages do symbolic computation by manipulating
strings of symbols until a configuration is found that corresponds to a known result.

Other mathematicians' views of Ramanujan

Hardy said : "He combined a power of generalization, a feeling for form, and a capacity for rapid modification of his
hypotheses, that were often really startling, and made him, in his own peculiar field, without a rival in his day. The

limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular
equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any
mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant
terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of
a doubly periodic function or ofCauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of
a complex variable was...".[91] When asked about the methods employed by Ramanujan to arrive at his solutions,
Hardy said that they were "arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was
entirely unable to give any coherent account."[92]He also stated that he had "never met his equal, and can compare
him only with Euler or Jacobi.
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