Srinivasa Ramanujan

Location

Trinity College,Cambridge, CB2 1TQ
United Kingdom
52° 10' 21.3528" N, 0° 6' 40.3992" E
See map: Google Maps
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Date of birth: 
22 Dec 1887
City of birth: 
Erode
Country of birth: 
India
Date of death: 
26 Apr 1920
Location of death: 
Madras, India
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
14 Apr 1914
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1914-19

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About: 

Ramanujan is now recognised to be one of the leading number theorists of the twentieth century, many of whose insights and breakthroughs weren’t fully understood until decades after his death.  Although his time in England was one of great personal loneliness and poor health, his Cambridge years allowed him to build a collaboration with the British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy that was of fundamental importance for the work of both men.  Hardy said later: ‘I learnt from him much more than he learned from me’. Hardy had invited him to come to England to share his thoughts and speculations on western mathematics, from his post as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust.  There were connections through Hardy to Cambridge luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, and the Apostles (most of the male members of Bloomsbury were Cambridge men, many of whom had been Apostles).

Ramanujan became the second Indian Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, and the first Indian Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in the same year.

Connections: 

G. H. Hardy, Bertrand Russell.

Organizations: 
British Museum
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Published works: 

Collected Papers of Ramanujan (posthumously published, 1926)

Secondary works: 

Hardy, G. H., Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects suggested by his Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940)

Hardy, G. H., A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940)

Kanigel, Robert, The Man who knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (London: Scribners, 1991)

Kanigel, Robert, ‘Ramanujan, Srinivasa (1887–1920)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/51582]

Leavitt, David, The Indian Clerk (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

Ranganathan, S. K., Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967)

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Archive source: 

Hardy papers, Trinity College Cambridge

Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

National Archives of India, New Delhi