Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of India 's mathematical geniuses. He made wonderful contributions to the field of advanced mathematics. Ramanujan was born in his grandmother 's house in Erode, a small village near Chennai in Tamil Nadu. He joined the Town High School there in January 1898 and was a very good student. But his real aptitude lay in mathematics. He got a scholarship for his first year at the Government College in Kumbakonam. But he devoted more time to mathematics and neglected his other subjects. In 1906, Ramanujan joined Pachaiyappa 's College at Chennai. He passed in math, but flunked all his other subjects. In the following years, he worked on developing his own ideas in mathematics, without having a real idea of the research topics then. On 14 July 1909, he married a nine-year-old girl his mother arranged for him. However, Ramanujan did not live with his wife until she was 12-years-old. During this period, he published many papers and was becoming well known in Chennai as a mathematical genius. In 1913, while he worked as a clerk in the Indian Mathematical Society, Ramanujan wrote to Cambridge mathematician, GH Hardy, and told him about his work. Soon a regular correspondence developed between the two. And in 1914 Ramanujan enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge. There, Hardy and Ramanujan began collaborating. But Ramanujan did not keep well. Being an orthodox Brahmin, he was a strict vegetarian. During World War I, when food was already scarce, it got harder for him to get special food and Ramanujan began having health problems. But, with Hardy 's encouragement, he continued to publish papers which were very well-received in the academic community. In 1916, Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research. But a year later he fell seriously ill and his doctors feared that he would die. Ramanujan was