Today the country celebrates the National Mathematics Day on the birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan. He put India on the global academic scene, with his pure intellect and intuition.
If you are into mathematics, you would have heard of 1729 as the Ramanujan number, and if you are not into mathematics, you would still have heard of the Man who knew Infinity.
Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems considered to be unsolvable.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, becoming the second Indian to do so. At age 31 he was one of the youngest Fellows in the history of the Royal Society. On 13 October 1918, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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So, while the nation celebrates this genius, here are some inspiring lessons from his life.
Ramanujan began his academic career as a regular kid. Like many of us, he would dislike going to school. In fact, his family had to hire a constable to ensure that he did not bunk and attended school diligently.
At the age of 16, he found a book that awakened his mathematical genius. The book was a library-loaned copy of A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics by G. S. Carr, which was a collection of 5,000 theorems.
Due to his calibre, he was awarded a scholarship in the Government Arts College, Kumbakonam. Due to his keen interest in maths, he couldn’t focus on other subjects. He lost his scholarship because he failed other subjects in the exam.
He experienced parental pressures just like us. The societal duty of marriage did not escape his lot. In 1909, he was married to a child bride.
Ramanujan was very religious. When a renowned mathematician, G. H. Hardy invited him to Cambridge, he refused to go. As a brahmin, he considered crossing the sea as taboo. However, he later agreed as his mother got a vivid dream in which their family goddess Namagiri commanded her to ‘to stand no longer between her son and the fulfilment of his life’s purpose’.
Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He claimed to see visions of her male consort Narsimha in dreams, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.
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This synthesis of modern genius and traditional roots made up the man SrininvasaRamanujan as we know him.
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