Presented by : STEFFY Class : IX -B

Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu. His father worked in Kumbakonam as a clerk in a cloth merchant's shop. At the of five Ramanujan went to primary school in Kumbakonam. In 1898 at age 10, he entered the Town High School in Kumbakonam. At the age of eleven he was lent books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney by two lodgers at his home who studied at the Government college. He mastered them by the age of thirteen. Ramanujan was a bright student, winning academic prizes in high school. At age of 16 his life took a decisive turn after he obtained a book titled" A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics".

The book was simply a compilation of thousands of mathematical results, most set down with little or no indication of proof. The book generated Ramanujan's interest in mathematics and he worked through the book's results and beyond. By 1904 Ramanujan had begun to undertake deep research. He investigated the series (1/n) and calculated Euler's constant to 15 decimal places. He began to study the Bernoulli numbers, although this was entirely his own independent discovery. He was given a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam which he entered in 1904. But he neglected his other subjects at the cost of mathematics and failed in college examination. He dropped out of the college.

Ramanujan lived off the charity of friends, filling notebooks with mathematical discoveries and seeking patrons to support his work. In 1906 Ramanujan went to Madras where he entered Pachaiyappa's College. His aim was to pass the First Arts examination which would allow him to be admitted to the University of Madras. Continuing his mathematical work Ramanujan studied continued fractions and divergent series in 1908. At this stage he became seriously ill again and underwent an operation in April 1909 after which he took him some considerable time to recover.

Ramanujan fell seriously ill in 1917 and his doctors feared that he would die. He did improve a little by September but spent most of his time in various nursing homes. On February 18, 1918 Ramanujan was elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and later he was also elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. By the end of November 1918 Ramanujan's health had greatly improved. Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February 1919 arriving on 13 March. However his health was very poor and, despite medical treatment, he died on April 6, 1920.

Mathematical achievements
In mathematics, there is a distinction between having an insight and having a proof. Ramanujan's talent suggested a plethora of formulae that could then be investigated in that Ramanujan's discoveries are unusually rich and that there is often more to ( them than initially meets the eye. As a by-product, new directions of research were opened up. Examples of the most interesting of these formulae include the intriguing infinite series for , one of which is below given

One of his remarkable capabilities was the rapid solution for problems. He was sharing a room with P. C. Mahalanobis who had a problem, "Imagine that you are on a street with houses marked 1 through n. There is a house in between (x) such that the sum of the house numbers to left of it equals the sum of the house numbers to its right. If n is between 50 and 500, what are n and x?" This is a bivariate problem with multiple solutions. Ramanujan thought about it and gave the answer with a twist: He gave a continued fraction. The unusual part was that it was the solution to the whole class of problems. Mahalanobis was astounded and asked how he did it. "It is simple. The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. Which continued fraction, I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind", Ramanujan replied.[85][86]

His intuition also led him to derive some previously unknown identities, such as

for all , where (z) is the gamma function. Expanding into series of powers and equating coefficients of 0, 4, and 8 gives some deep identities for the hyperbolic secant.
.

He discovered mock theta functions in the last year of his life. For many years these functions were a mystery, but they are now known to be the holomorphic parts of harmonic weak Maass forms.

A life that apart from a few of us, know very little of, because so far we have books. And very few read those. But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. His story is perfect for stage, a fable full of luck, hope, romance, inspiration and finally tragedy. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percents perspiration, or so someone said. Possibly true but more I suspect, for its feel good quality than anything else
, we will now know him as the man who

discovered the theory on partition numbers

you