Ramanujan, Srinivasa


Ramanujan, Srinivasa

(shrē'nĭvä`sə rämä`no͝ojən), 1889–1920, Indian mathematician. He was a self-taught genius in pure mathematics who made original contributions to function theory, power series, and number theory with the training gained from a single textbook. He was invited to Cambridge by G. H. Hardy, with whom he collaborated, and continued there his work in number theory. He died of tuberculosis.

Bibliography

See R. Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991).

Ramanujan, Srinivasa

 

Born Dec. 22, 1887, in Erode, southern India; died Apr. 26, 1920, near Madras. Indian mathematician.

Although Ramanujan lacked any special mathematical training, he obtained remarkable results in number theory. His most significant study, written with G. Hardy, was on the asymptotic behavior of the function p(n)—the number of ways the number n can be written as a sum of positive terms.

REFERENCE

Levin, V. I. “Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo indiiskogo matematika S. Ramanudzhana.” Istoriko-matematicheskie issledovaniia, issue 13, pp. 333–78, 1960. (Contains bibliography.)