Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) Indian Mathematician + Legendary Hero Mini Biography ● Found a copy of A Synopsis of ​ Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics by George Carr and ​ self-taught himself mathematics. ● Went to college, but failed his non-math classes and lost his scholarship ● Wrote all his thoughts down in notebooks, but lacked a formal and rigorous proof method ● Sent letters and his work to University of Cambridge. His 3rd letter reached G.H. Hardy, who was incredibly impressed by Ramanujan’s work. Some of it was already proved, other material was completely new, but all of it was intriguing to Hardy. ● As an example, Ramanujan had a lot of work with infinite series and found a series that was later used to calculate pi to over 17 million digits. ● G.H. Hardy brought Ramanujan over to Europe and helped him formalize his math skills. Much of their work revolutionized number theory as it is today. ● Ramanujan eventually fell ill during World War I, made the difficult journey back to India, and passed away shortly after Amazing Anecdotes ● One of the ideas he presented in his letter was the notion that the sum of all positive integers can be equal to the opposite of one-twelfth (an idea that was shown by Reimann years earlier, and is currently used in string theory) ● When Hardy visited Ramanujan in the hospital, he told him about the rather dull number of his taxicab he had taken: 1729. Ramanujan quickly exclaimed “No, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.” 1729 is now called the Hardy-Ramanujan number, and is the first of the taxicab numbers, with the second being 87539319. ● Hardy rated mathematicians on a scale of 0 to 100. He put himself at 25, David Hilbert at 80, and Ramanujan was a whopping 100! ● Ramanujan studied Fermat’s Last Theorem, and came up with an infinite list of near-misses of counter-examples, but never got it down exactly. ● His birthday in December is celebrated in India as National Mathematics Day “In order to honor the legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Spirit of Ramanujan STEM Talent Initiative supports emerging engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who lack traditional institutional support through financial grants and mentorship opportunities.” https://spiritoframanujan.com/home/ Keeping with the Spirit of Ramanujan, expii has a collection of interactive math puzzles that includes holiday and pop culture themed tasks. https://www.expii.com/solve REFERENCES Fun Facts: Gregersen, E. (n.d.). 6 Interesting Facts about Srinivasa Ramanujan. Encyclopedia Britannica. ​ ​ Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/story/interesting-facts-about-srinivasa-ramanujan ​ Biography: Wolfram, S. (2016). Who Was Ramanujan? Stephen Wolfram Blog. Retrieved from ​ ​ https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/04/who-was-ramanujan/ .