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)
I have to drink coffee to stay awake for mathematics.
My formulas are my prayers.
I am not a teacher; I am a student of the universe.
I have to listen to the whispers of the divine to do mathematics.
I am not a logician; I am an intuitive.
I have to take a nap to solve difficult mathematical problems.
My equations are my conversations with God.
I am not a philosopher; I am a mathematician.
I have to look at the stars to understand mathematics.
I am not a theorist; I am an empiricist.
I have to sing to get my mathematical ideas flowing.
My discoveries are gifts from the divine.
I am not a scholar of books; I am a scholar of numbers.
I have to feel the rhythm of the universe to do mathematics.
To preserve my health I must be a vegetarian.
I am a mathematician and I am interested in numbers.
I have found my God in mathematics.
It is the peculiar beauty of the method of partitions that it is applicable to all numbers, however large.
I can write down a theorem as soon as I conceive it. It is like a flash of light.
The divine gives me the ideas.
Contemporaries of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Other Mathematicss born within 50 years of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).