Ramanujan- The greatest mathematician of all time.
Is it possible that a person with no formal education in mathematics to discover so many theories and make a huge breakthrough in the field of mathematics? Can a person be immensely obsessed with mathematics that he would try to find more theorems and equations even before his last breath, lying in his death bed? Can a clerk be a Fellow of the Royal Society in Cambridge? Well, these questions can be answered yes, thanks to the incredible mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. From an ordinary human living an ordinary, mundane life to an extraordinary mathematician crossing all the thresholds in his journey to success, Ramanujan is an inspiration to many, myself included, rather he is my hero
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As he was from a poor family, he couldn’t afford to buy many notebooks, he worked by writing on a slate or drawing in sand, and wrote only the final conclusion in his notebooks, not the method that led him to them. At present, after 130 years of his death, some of his problems couldn’t be even solved by the greater minds of mathematics as the method to solve some problems were unknown and are left to be solved! At the age of thirteen, he mastered the important concept in mathematics- advanced trigonometry, and discovered some theorems on his own. I was given an introduction to trigonometry when I was in tenth grade in high school, it is so astounding that a thirteen-year-old could master in advanced trigonometry, by just reading the book with no formal training! The most important book that bought out a genius in Ramanujan was a collection of 5000 theorems written by G.S. Carr. With the help of Hardy, Ramanujan was able to travel to England and was able to find lots of proofs and solutions to the unknown problems in mathematics. Unfortunately, Ramanujan was diagnosed with tuberculosis in his later years in Cambridge as a result he was hospitalized. When hardy came to visit Ramanujan, he told him about the cab number in which he arrived- 1729 and reported that it was rather a dull number, but even when he[Ramanujan] was sick he discovered that 1729 is an interesting number as it can only be expressed as a sum of the squares of two sets of numbers (13 + 123 and 93 + 103). Thereafter, 1729 is called the Ramanujan number. His mathematical skills and abilities can only be compared to the most prominent mathematicians like Euler, Gauss, Jacobi and so on. Ramanujan’s interest in mathematics and his extraordinary skills in mathematics had been the