3. Ramanujan was born on 22 December
1887 in Erode, Masras Presidency Madras
(now Tamil Nadu), at the residence of his
maternal grandparents in a Brahmin family.
4. During his school days, he impressed his
classmates, senior students and teachers
with his extraordinary intuition and
astounding proficiency in several branches
of mathematics.
5. In 1904, when he was just 16, Ramanujan
began investigating the series of S (1/n)
and calculated Euler’s Constant to 15
decimal places. His study of Bernoulli
numbers also commenced at this stage.
6. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a largely self-
taught pure mathematician. Hindered by
poverty and ill-health, his highly original
work has considerably enriched number
theory and, more recently, physics.
7. Ramanujan and his supporters contacted a
number of British professors, but only one
was receptive – an eminent pure
mathematician at the University of
Cambridge – Godfrey Harold Hardy, known
to everyone as G. H. Hardy, who received a
letter from Ramanujan in January 1913.
8. The notebooks he had brought from India
were filled with thousands of identities,
equations and theorems which he had
discovered for himself in the years 1903 –
1914.
9. In 1919 and died soon thereafter at the
age of 32 in 1920
10. The number 1729 is known as the Hardy–
Ramanujan number after a famous
anecdote of the British mathematician G.
H. Hardy regarding a visit to the hospital to
see Ramanujan.
The two different ways are
1729 = 13 + 123
= 93 + 103
