Srinivasa Ramanujan, arguably India’s greatest mathematician, had but one year of college education and was largely self-taught. Born on December 22, 1887 in the South Indian town of Erode in Tamil Nadu, Ramanujan began his single-minded devotion to mathematics when he borrowed Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics from the local government college library. Shortly thereafter, Ramanujan passed the matriculation exam from the University of Madras with a first class and entered the Government College at Kumbakonam. But, being totally absorbed in mathematics, he would not study any other subject thus leading to his failure to obtain a college degree.
What Ramanujan went on to do later was unimaginable in the colonial days of the country. He made contact with the famous Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy who, quite certain that Ramanujan was nothing short of a mathematical genius, asked him to come to London. After a little persuasion from E.H. Neville, Ramanujan finally went to London, thus overcoming the fear of losing his Brahmin identity upon crossing the sea to a foreign land, a prevalent social stigma at that time. This paved the way for thousands of Indians to follow suit in later years.
With Hardy, Ramanujan laid down some key concepts for 20th and even 21st century mathematics. Together they developed mathematical techniques like the circle method, which has helped tackle tricky mathematical problems like the Waring’s conjecture and Goldbach Conjecture. Their work also paved the way for a new branch of mathematics called probabilistic number theory.
When Hardy rated his contemporary mathematicians on the basis of pure talent, on a scale of 100, he gave himself a score of 25, Littlewood a score of 30, the great German mathematician D. Hubert 80, and Ramanujan 100.
Though it might be difficult to grasp the sheer brilliance of Ramanujan because of the highly advanced field of work he was working in, what is remarkable about him is his cultural legacy. He was an icon who in the midst of the British colonial period signified the respectability that his people deserved from their colonial rulers.
On Ramanujan’s birth centenary in 1987, Nobel prize winning astrophysicist Subhramanyam Chandrashekhar said that Ramanujan’s act of going to England and being respected and celebrated by his own oppressors filled him with a sense of joy and pride. He further added that the fact that Ramanujan grew up in an intellectually and scientifically restricted environment and could still go on to be regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the century was a source of immense hope for young and aspiring Indian men and women. Pursuing science and education became priorities in order to fulfil the dreams of the yet to be independent India.
Ramanujan is probably India’s most celebrated scientific figure. At least five films have been made on his life. Only when all of Ramanujan’s theorems are proved and his work thoroughly understood can a definitive measure of his influence be made. Till then, Ramanujan continues to amaze us as the man who, in a life-span of 32 years, seems to have known the infinity.
source https://www.indiaoutbound.org/ramanujan-trailblazer-in-education/
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