India celebrates 131st birth-anniversary of 'Ramanujan'; The man who knew infinity

Lucknow: Honoring the birth of one of the greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, India celebrates Dec 22 as 'National Mathematics Day'.

India has always been hailed high in the field of mathematics and Ramanujan is one of the reasons behind this. He made significant contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory and continued fractions despite having not received any formal training in mathematics and completed mathematical research on his own in isolation. By the time he was in late teen, he completed an investigation on Bernoulli numbers and had calculated the Euler-Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places. Later, he moved to England and began working with the renowned mathematician G.H.Hardy. He died at an early age of 32 of Tuberculosis.

In 2011, honoring his 125th birth-anniversary, Indian Government declared that December 22 will be celebrated as National Mathematics Day every year.

On his Birth-anniversary newztrack.com brings you some unknown facts:

-Ramanujan was lonely as he was a deferentially-abled child and nobody could understand him.

-He hailed from a poor family and used to use slate instead of paper.

-Srinivasa was so obsessed of mathematics that he failed in all the other subjects and lost his scholarship at Government Arts college.

-He was such a mathematical genius that he discovered his own theorems.

-It was just because of of his own keen insight and natural intelligence that he came up with infinite series π (pie).

-He was selected as one of the youngest fellow in the history of royal society in 1918.

-Srinivasa became a victim of racism in England.

-In his honor, the number 1729 is called 'Hardy-Ramanujan' number regarding an incident of a taxi with this number. When Ramanujan was ill and Hardy went to meet him in hospital, Hardy had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to him rather a dull one, and that he hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," Ramanujan replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." i.e, 1729=1³+12³=9³+10³.

-A Tamil based biographical film on Ramanujan’s life was released in 2014.

-Google honored him on his 125th birth anniversary by replacing its logo with a doodle on its home page.

-Srinivasa’s contribution to mathematics lies mainly in analysis, game theory and infinite series.

-Ramanujan was elected ” for his investigation in Elliptic functions and the Theory of Numbers”.

-He was also elected a fellow of trinity College- the first Indian to be honored.