Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in a small town called Erode, in Tamil Nadu, India. His family was poor. His father worked in a sari shop and his mother took care of the home. Even though they didn’t have much money, Ramanujan’s parents always wanted him to study and become smart.
From a young age, Ramanujan loved numbers. He was a quiet and curious boy, always thinking about math problems. When he was just five, he started going to school and quickly became the best in his class at math. By the time he was ten, he was already the best math student in his whole district! Teachers and other students saw that he was special.
When Ramanujan was only 11, he finished all the math books that even college students used. He borrowed books from others and learned more by himself. At 13, he taught himself advanced math from a book called "Trigonometry" by S. L. Loney. Ramanujan was so clever that his teachers were surprised by how much he knew.
At age 16, a friend gave him an old math book with 5,000 theorems. Most people would get confused, but Ramanujan loved the book! He worked out all the theorems by himself and filled notebooks with his own new math ideas.
But Ramanujan had a problem: he only liked math. He didn’t want to study other subjects like English or history. So when he went to college, he failed the other subjects and lost his scholarship. He could not finish college. This made life very hard for him. He got married to a girl named Janaki when he was 22, but he still did not have a good job and his family was very poor.
Even though he struggled, Ramanujan never gave up on math. He did small tutoring jobs, but most of the time, he just wrote down his own math ideas in notebooks. He became known in South India as a math genius. Some kind people, like Mr. Rao, helped him with money so he could keep working on math.
In 1912, Ramanujan got a job as a clerk at Madras Port Trust. The boss there liked math and encouraged him. Ramanujan started sending his math work to mathematicians in England. At first, many did not believe his work was real. But finally, in 1913, a famous Cambridge professor, G. H. Hardy, got a letter from Ramanujan full of strange math formulas. Hardy checked Ramanujan’s math and was amazed! He knew Ramanujan was a real genius.
Hardy invited Ramanujan to come to Cambridge University in England. It was hard for Ramanujan to go because of family and religious reasons, but finally his mother let him go. In 1914, Ramanujan traveled to England, leaving his family behind.
At Cambridge, Ramanujan worked with Hardy and other math experts. He shared many new ideas, some of which no one had ever seen before. He published about 30 research papers in just five years. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, which were big honors. Ramanujan became very famous among mathematicians.
But life in England was not easy for Ramanujan. He was a strict vegetarian, and during World War I, good food was hard to find. He got sick a lot and missed his family. Even when he was in the hospital, he thought about math! He once told Hardy that 1729 was a special number because it could be written as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
In 1919, Ramanujan returned to India because he was very sick. He continued doing math, even from his bed. He discovered new things called “mock theta functions,” which were later found to be very important.
Sadly, Ramanujan died on April 26, 1920, when he was only 32 years old. His wife, Janaki, was just 21. People were very sad, especially his friend Hardy. But Ramanujan’s notebooks were full of math ideas that other mathematicians are still studying today.
Ramanujan showed that with passion and hard work, anyone can do great things, even without much money or help. He will always be remembered as one of the greatest math geniuses ever.
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