Happy Birthday, Srinivasa Ramanujan

Today is the birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician who studied number theory, mastered modular and partition functions, and designed summation formulas. Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 in Erode, a city along the banks of the Cauvery River in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. He enrolled in a local high at the age of 10, but learned more about mathematics from the college students who boarded in parents' home. According to Robert Kanigel, Ramanujan's biographer and author of The Man Who Knew Infinity, the young mathematician was deeply influenced by two borrowed books: S.L. Loney's Plane Trigonometry and George Shoobridge Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics. Carr's work, a list of 5000 mathematical formulas, inspired Ramanujan to develop his own proofs for these theorems. By the age of 17, Ramanujan had calculated Euler's constant to 15 decimal places and proposed a new class of numbers. Although his peers "stood in respectful awe of him", said one contemporary, "we, including his teachers, rarely understood him".

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