Srinivasa Ramanujan had almost no formal training in advanced mathematics. He taught himself from a single textbook of theorems with no proofs attached. Within a few years, that self-taught genius was corresponding with Cambridge’s top mathematicians as an equal.
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A Self-Taught Genius Reaches Cambridge
- Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, in present-day Tamil Nadu. He was almost entirely self-taught in advanced mathematics.
- In 1913, Ramanujan began writing to British mathematician G.H. Hardy at Cambridge. Hardy was initially skeptical of Ramanujan’s unorthodox, proof-free theorems, but soon recognised their real depth.
- Hardy arranged a scholarship and a Trinity College grant for Ramanujan. Ramanujan moved to England in 1914 and worked closely with Hardy on number theory, continued fractions, and infinite series.
- Ramanujan and Hardy developed an important formula for the partition function. It counts the ways a number can be written as a sum of positive integers. Cambridge awarded Ramanujan a research degree in 1916, and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918.
- Ramanujan died on 26 April 1920, of tuberculosis, at just 32 years old. He had returned to India shortly before his death.
- India observes National Mathematics Day on 22 December, Ramanujan’s birthday. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh introduced the day in 2011, and it was first observed in 2012.
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The 1729 Taxicab Number
- The Hardy-Ramanujan number, 1729, comes from a famous hospital-visit anecdote. Hardy mentioned his taxi’s number, 1729, calling it a dull number. Ramanujan immediately replied that it was actually fascinating. It’s the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (1³+12³ and 9³+10³).
- 1729 gave its name to a whole mathematical category: “taxicab numbers.” The second taxicab number, Taxicab(2), is 1729 itself, honouring the anecdote.
- Ramanujan excelled overwhelmingly at mathematics but struggled badly in other school subjects. He failed non-mathematics exams multiple times, which nearly derailed his early academic path entirely.
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What the Legend Leaves Out
- The 1729 anecdote is often told as if Ramanujan spotted the property instantly, on the spot. In fact, he had already recorded that same property of 1729 in his own notebooks, well before he even arrived in England. This better reflects how his insight actually worked. It came from deep prior familiarity with numbers, not pure improvisation.
- Ramanujan and Hardy’s partition-function formula was only proven to give exact values later, by mathematician Hans Rademacher. This is a common pattern in mathematics: a brilliant formula can be useful and correct in practice well before its full rigorous proof exists.
- Ramanujan’s notebooks are filled with results he never had time to formally prove or publish. Mathematicians still actively study them today, over a century after his death. Some of his conjectures weren’t proven correct until decades later, using mathematical tools that didn’t exist in his own lifetime.
- A later self-taught Indian mathematician followed a similar arc, though his recognition took even longer. See SciTech0097 — D.R. Kaprekar, whose work went largely unnoticed in India until an American magazine wrote about him, decades after his key discoveries.
📝 Previous Year Questions
Which Scientist Does This Biopic Cover?
- 2016, Q99 — Answer: (a) S. Ramanujan “The Man Who Knew Infinity” (2015) is based on the biography of S. Ramanujan, starring Dev Patel.
- View this question on the full 2016 paper →
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