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 found a function which exactly represents the number of prime numbers less than x.
The calculated value of π is 3.141592653589793238462643383279...
Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends.
My brain is only a receiving set in the universe. I pick up knowledge from the air.
Please remember, I have not created these formulae. They already exist in the nature. I have only discovered them.
I have discovered some wonderful theorems.
The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity.
Zero is the embodiment of perfection.
I am not a mathematician in the ordinary sense. I am a 'singular' function.
I am not a man of letters, but a man of numbers.
The sum of all numbers is -1/12.
I had never seen anything in the least like them before. A single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.
My theorems are my children.
I am not a calculator. I am a creator.
The goddess Namagiri whispered the equations in my ear.
I am a man of intuition. I see the truth, and then I prove it.
The number 1729 is a very interesting number.
I have no taste for elaborate methodology. I work by intuition.
The infinite series are the breath of my life.
My mind is a blank slate on which the universe writes its equations.
Contemporaries of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Other Mathematicss born within 50 years of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).