Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyangar (Tamil: ஶ்ரீநிவாஸ ராமாநுஜையங்கார், Romanized: Śrīnivāsa Rāmānujaiyaṅgār (December 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920) was an Indian mathematician active in the early 20th century. He made profound contributions in the fields of mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions, and even solved mathematical problems that were considered unsolvable at the time. Ramanujan initially conducted his mathematical research alone in relative isolation. According to Hans Eysenck, "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians of the day in his work, but mostly failed. What he showed people was too new, too unfamiliar, and presented in an unusual way; they almost ignored him." Looking for mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a correspondence with the British mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge. Hardy recognized the extraordinary nature of Ramanujan's work and arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In Hardy's notes, he commented that Ramanujan had proposed ground-breaking new theorems, some of which "were completely beyond my comprehension; I had never seen anything even remotely like them before" and some of which were mathematical results that had just been proven but were extremely advanced at the time. During his lifetime, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 mathematical results (mainly identities and equations). Many of these results were completely novel; his highly original and unconventional discoveries, such as Ramanujan's prime numbers, Ramanujan's theta function, the integer splitting formula, and the pseudo-theta function, opened up entirely new areas of research and inspired much later research. Of his thousands of formulas, the vast majority have been proven correct. The scientific journal "Ramanujan's Journal" was founded precisely to publish works in all fields of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan; and his notebooks recording published and unpublished results have been deeply analyzed and studied in the decades after his death, becoming the source of new mathematical ideas. Until 2012, researchers continued to discover that the few words about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" written in his notes in response to certain discoveries turned out to be profound and subtle results in number theory, and these results were not discovered until nearly a century after Ramanujan's death. He became one of the youngest fellows in the history of the Royal Society and