Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician born in 1887 who made pioneering contributions to the theory of numbers, including the properties of the partition function. He was largely self-taught and demonstrated extraordinary mathematical abilities from a young age. Some of his most famous discoveries include properties of Bernoulli numbers and identifying 1729 as a number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways, now known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number. Despite lacking formal training, he was recognized for his genius and received support to study at the University of Cambridge.