Srinivasa Ramanujan – India’s greatest mathematical genius who made substantial contributions to the analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.
At the age of 5, Ramanujan entered the primary school in Kumbakonam in January 1898. At the Town High School, Ramanujan was to do well in all his school subjects and showed himself an able all round scholar.
Few glimpse of his house at Kumbakonam..
In 1900 he began to work on his own on mathematics summing geometric and arithmetic series.
Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902 and he went on to find his own method to solve the quartic. The following year, not knowing that the quintic could not be solved by radicals, he tried (and of course failed) to solve the quintic.
In 1917 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and worryingly low vitamin levels. He spent months being cared for in sanitariums and nursing homes.
In February 1919 his health seemed to have recovered sufficiently for him to return to India, but sadly he would only live for about a year on his return. His death was most likely caused by hepatic amoebiasis caused by liver parasites on April 26, 1920.
Ramanujan left a number of unpublished notebooks filled with theorems that mathematicians have continued to study. Ramanujan’s methods were so terse and novel and his presentation so lacking in clearness and precision, that the ordinary unaccustomed to such intellectual gymnastics, could hardly follow him
