Srinivasa Ramanujan
Self-taught genius who made extraordinary contributions
Most quoted
"I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as 'startling'."
— from First letter to G.H. Hardy, 1913
"I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics."
— from Letter to G.H. Hardy, 1913
"I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. 'No,' he replied, 'it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.'"
— from Recounted by G.H. Hardy, 1918
All quotes by Srinivasa Ramanujan (688)
Modular forms sing harmonies of numbers.
From Madras to Cambridge, a journey of the mind.
q-series are the language of partitions.
I find joy in solving the unsolvable.
Hardy, your rigor complements my intuition.
The divine writes on the slate of my mind.
My early failures taught me perseverance.
The Ramanujan prime is every prime in a certain range.
In pain, I still see the beauty of pi.
Theta functions transform under modular group.
I am grateful for the Royal Society's recognition.
Life's meaning is in the pursuit of truth.
Numbers are eternal; humans are transient.
My second letter to Hardy sealed my fate.
The integral from 0 to infinity of x^{n-1}/(1+x) dx = pi / sin(pi n).
Intuition guides where proof lags.
Family is the anchor in stormy seas of research.
The circle of numbers never ends.
I discovered the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic series.
In my final days, I entrust my work to the world.
Contemporaries of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Other Mathematicss born within 50 years of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).