Srinivasa Ramanujan

Submitted by obl7 on
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Date of birth
City of birth
Erode
Country of birth
India
Date of death
Location of death
Madras, India
Date of 1st arrival in Britain
Dates of time spent in Britain

1914-19

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About

Ramanujan is now recognised to be one of the leading number theorists of the twentieth century, many of whose insights and breakthroughs weren’t fully understood until decades after his death.  Although his time in England was one of great personal loneliness and poor health, his Cambridge years allowed him to build a collaboration with the British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy that was of fundamental importance for the work of both men.  Hardy said later: ‘I learnt from him much more than he learned from me’. Hardy had invited him to come to England to share his thoughts and speculations on western mathematics, from his post as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust.  There were connections through Hardy to Cambridge luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, and the Apostles (most of the male members of Bloomsbury were Cambridge men, many of whom had been Apostles).

Ramanujan became the second Indian Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, and the first Indian Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in the same year.

Connections

G. H. Hardy, Bertrand Russell.

Organizations
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Published works

Collected Papers of Ramanujan (posthumously published, 1926)

Secondary works

Hardy, G. H., Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects suggested by his Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940)

Hardy, G. H., A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940)

Kanigel, Robert, The Man who knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (London: Scribners, 1991)

Kanigel, Robert, ‘Ramanujan, Srinivasa (1887–1920)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/51582]

Leavitt, David, The Indian Clerk (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

Ranganathan, S. K., Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967)

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Archive source

Hardy papers, Trinity College Cambridge

Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

National Archives of India, New Delhi