National Mathematics Day 2020: Celebrating S Ramanujan's contribution to maths

National Mathematics Day is celebrated every year in India on December 22 to mark the birth anniversary of Indian Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and to recognise his achievements. In 2012, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had declared December 22 as National Mathematics Day.

The main objective behind celebrating the day is to raise awareness among people about the importance of mathematics for the development of humanity.

Born on December 22, 1887, Srinivasa Ramanujan originated from  Erode, Madras, India and went on to become a decorated mathematician and autodidact. He had no formal pure mathematical education but that didn't stop him from making strides in fields of mathematics like number theory, mathematical analysis, continued fractions and infinite series.

All about Srinivasa Ramanujan

Ramanujan was extremely intelligent and had also built a vast knowledge in subjects besides mathematics. He attained distinctions among his peers in arithmetic, English, geography, and Tamil in 1897.

He graduated from Town Higher Secondary School in 1904 and was awarded the K Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school's headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. 

In his later years, Ramanujan's academic honours landed him a scholarship to Government Arts College in Kumbakonam. However, he refused to study any other subject besides mathematics and got expelled. He later secured admission into another college but yet again, he did not study anything besides mathematics.

While working for the Chief Accountant of the Madras Port Trust, he sent his mathematical work to a renowned British mathematician named GH Hardy. Hardy then presented Ramanujan papers to his co-workers at Trinity College. That's where his genius became internationally noticed.

Ramanujan joined the Trinity College a few months before World War I began. In 1916, he received a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree.

After receiving numerous awards and a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge, he became a member of the London Mathematical Society in 1917.  A year later, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society for his research on Elliptic Functions and theory of numbers. In the same year, in October, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College.

Ramanujan returned to India in 1919 and a year later, he breathed his last at the age of 32. Ramanujan passed away after a long battle with tuberculosis. Many of his mathematical theorems are still in use today.

Srinivasa Ramanujan's works

He compiled as many as 3900 results and identities in his lifetime. The most important contributions were to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

His work on Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions continue to open new areas of research.

Among the most famous are Ramanujan Number- also called the magic number which is 1729. It is the smallest number that can be expressed as a sum of cubes of two different sets of numbers. Ramajuna Square is another mathematical puzzle that enthralls all.

A self-taught mathematician who made extraordinary contributions, S Ramanujan was one of the most influential mathematicians of his time.