Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode in 1887 and grew up in Kumbakonam, developing an extraordinary, almost entirely self-taught command of mathematics with minimal access to formal training or advanced texts. Working largely in isolation, he filled notebooks with original theorems and formulas across number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. In 1913 he wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, enclosing pages of results without proof; Hardy, astonished by their originality, arranged for Ramanujan to travel to England, beginning one of the most celebrated collaborations in the history of mathematics. Over the following years, working through poor health and an unfamiliar climate, Ramanujan produced landmark results on partition functions, mock theta functions, and highly composite numbers, and became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He returned to India in 1919 in declining health and died in 1920 at just 32. Mathematicians continue to find applications for his identities in fields as far removed from pure number theory as string theory and cryptography, and his life has become a byword for raw mathematical genius emerging outside formal institutions.