What was ramanujan famous for

Next Story Karnataka ready with cold chain system for Covaxin: Minister. Popular on BI. Latest Stories. Trending News. Buying Guides. Included are technical lectures on mathematics influenced by Ramanujan's work, public presentations on Ramanujan's notebooks, dance performances and a film about Ramanujan's life.

The awardee this year is Zhiwei Yun of Stanford University, whose work lies at the intersection of geometric representation theory, algebraic geometry and number theory. Follow Evelyn Lamb on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. In February Hardy wrote see [ 3 ] :- Batty Shaw found out, what other doctors did not know, that he had undergone an operation about four years ago.

His worst theory was that this had really been for the removal of a malignant growth, wrongly diagnosed. In view of the fact that Ramanujan is no worse than six months ago, he has now abandoned this theory - the other doctors never gave it any support. Tubercle has been the provisionally accepted theory, apart from this, since the original idea of gastric ulcer was given up. Like all Indians he is fatalistic, and it is terribly hard to get him to take care of himself. On 18 February Ramanujan was elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and then three days later, the greatest honour that he would receive, his name appeared on the list for election as a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

His election as a fellow of the Royal Society was confirmed on 2 May , then on 10 October he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, the fellowship to run for six years. The honours which were bestowed on Ramanujan seemed to help his health improve a little and he renewed his effors at producing mathematics. By the end of November Ramanujan's health had greatly improved. Hardy wrote in a letter [ 3 ] :- I think we may now hope that he has turned to corner, and is on the road to a real recovery.

His temperature has ceased to be irregular, and he has gained nearly a stone in weight. There has never been any sign of any diminuation in his extraordinary mathematical talents. He has produced less, naturally, during his illness but the quality has been the same. He will return to India with a scientific standing and reputation such as no Indian has enjoyed before, and I am confident that India will regard him as the treasure he is. His natural simplicity and modesty has never been affected in the least by success - indeed all that is wanted is to get him to realise that he really is a success.

Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February arriving on 13 March. However his health was very poor and, despite medical treatment, he died there the following year. The letters Ramanujan wrote to Hardy in had contained many fascinating results. Ramanujan worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series and functional equations of the zeta function. On the other hand he had only a vague idea of what constitutes a mathematical proof.

Despite many brilliant results, some of his theorems on prime numbers were completely wrong. Ramanujan independently discovered results of Gauss , Kummer and others on hypergeometric series. Ramanujan's own work on partial sums and products of hypergeometric series have led to major development in the topic. Perhaps his most famous work was on the number p n of partitions of an integer n n n into summands.

MacMahon had produced tables of the value of p n p n p n for small numbers n n n , and Ramanujan used this numerical data to conjecture some remarkable properties some of which he proved using elliptic functions.

Other were only proved after Ramanujan's death. In a joint paper with Hardy , Ramanujan gave an asymptotic formula for p n p n p n. It had the remarkable property that it appeared to give the correct value of p n p n p n , and this was later proved by Rademacher. Ramanujan left a number of unpublished notebooks filled with theorems that mathematicians have continued to study.

G N Watson , Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at Birmingham from to published 14 papers under the general title Theorems stated by Ramanujan and in all he published nearly 30 papers which were inspired by Ramanujan's work. Hardy passed on to Watson the large number of manuscripts of Ramanujan that he had, both written before and some written in Ramanujan's last year in India before his death. The picture above is taken from a stamp issued by the Indian Post Office to celebrate the 75 th anniversary of his birth.

References show. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. G H Hardy, Ramanujan Cambridge, J N Kapur ed. S Ramanujan, Collected Papers Cambridge, S R Ranganathan, Ramanujan : the man and the mathematician London, Unfortunately, his total immersion in mathematics was disastrous for Ramanujan's academic career: ignoring all his other subjects, he repeatedly failed his college exams.

As a college dropout from a poor family, Ramanujan's position was precarious. He lived off the charity of friends, filling notebooks with mathematical discoveries and seeking patrons to support his work. Finally he met with modest success when the Indian mathematician Ramachandra Rao provided him with first a modest subsidy, and later a clerkship at the Madras Port Trust.

During this period Ramanujan had his first paper published, a page work on Bernoulli numbers that appeared in in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

Still no one was quite sure if Ramanujan was a real genius or a crank. With the encouragement of friends, he wrote to mathematicians in Cambridge seeking validation of his work. Twice he wrote with no response; on the third try, he found Hardy. Hardy wrote enthusiastically back to Ramanujan, and Hardy's stamp of approval improved Ramanujan's status almost immediately.

Ramanujan was named a research scholar at the University of Madras, receiving double his clerk's salary and required only to submit quarterly reports on his work. But Hardy was determined that Ramanujan be brought to England. Ramanujan's mother resisted at first--high-caste Indians shunned travel to foreign lands--but finally gave in, ostensibly after a vision.