.png){kind=small}
Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Self-Taught Genius Who Revolutionized Modern Mathematics
In the temple town of Kumbakonam, where the Cauvery River bends through the green heart of Tamil Nadu, a young boy sat cross-legged on the floor of a modest Iyengar Brahmin household, filling slate after slate with numbers. It was the mid-1890s, and while other children played in the dusty streets outside, Srinivasa Ramanujan was disappearing into a world that seemed to exist nowhere but in his own mind. From an early age, he showed an intense absorption in numbers, spending long hours working through problems on his slate. Family recollections describe him as deeply focused, his fingers marked with chalk, his gaze distant with concentration. No one could have known then how far this quiet fascination would carry him.
The numbers seemed to come to him not through the step-by-step methods of formal proof, but as complete insights that arrived fully formed. Ramanujan later told friends and colleagues that his mathematics was deeply intuitive, and he sometimes described his ideas as being revealed to him in dreams. He attributed this inspiration to Namagiri, the family deity he worshipped at the Namakkal temple, saying that mathematical truths appeared to him during moments of sleep or meditation. While such accounts resist literal verification, they reflect something essential about his relationship with mathematics: for Ramanujan, it was not merely an intellectual pursuit, but a profoundly spiritual one, intertwined with faith, intuition, and inner vision.
His childhood offered little outward hint of the trajectory to come, except perhaps in its very ordinariness. Born on December 22, 1887, to a poor family—his father worked as a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop—Ramanujan grew up in a world shaped by ritual, financial insecurity, and tradition. The family moved often, struggled to make ends meet, and endured the loss of children to illness. Yet within this environment of scarcity, a mind of extraordinary abundance was quietly forming. At around ten years old, Ramanujan performed exceptionally well in his primary examinations, reportedly ranking first in his district. By twelve, he had mastered trigonometry, and soon after began deriving mathematical results on his own. Around the age of fifteen, he encountered a book that would transform his life: George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, a dense compendium of formulas and theorems that became his private universe.
The book itself was, by most accounts, unremarkable—a dense compilation of mathematical results with little explanation, first published in 1886. But for Ramanujan, it became something closer to scripture. Carr’s terse style, which listed thousands of theorems and formulas with few or no proofs, did not hinder him; if anything, it freed his imagination. Forced to work backward from results to methods, Ramanujan began forging his own paths through mathematics, developing techniques independently of established conventions. In the process, he uncovered unexpected patterns and relationships—connections across different areas of mathematics that would later astonish professional mathematicians and hint at the originality of his genius.
The tragedy was that few around him could fully grasp what he was discovering. Ramanujan’s consuming devotion to mathematics came at a real cost. He failed his college examinations—more than once—not for lack of ability, but because he neglected every subject except mathematics. Without a degree, the prospects for respectable employment were bleak. At the age of twenty-one, he entered an arranged marriage with Janaki Ammal, who was still a child at the time, in keeping with the social customs of the period; she would not live with him for several years. Responsibility weighed heavily on him even as his mind ranged freely through abstract realms. Eventually, he secured work as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust, earning a modest salary and spending his days recording columns of figures, while his notebooks filled with original results on infinite series, continued fractions, and number theory.
Those notebooks—three volumes of dense, cryptic formulae—were his private treasury. Written in an extraordinarily compressed style, with little to no explanation or proof, they contained results that would take decades for later mathematicians to verify, interpret, and place within existing theory. Some entries appeared to contradict established mathematical understanding, while others hinted at ideas far ahead of their time, opening paths into entirely new areas of research. It was as if a door to a parallel mathematical universe had briefly been opened, and Ramanujan had returned with fragments of what he had seen.
In 1913, isolated and increasingly desperate, Ramanujan took an extraordinary step: he wrote to several leading mathematicians in England, among them G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. His letter opened with striking humility, introducing himself as an unknown clerk working at the Madras Port Trust and emphasizing his lack of formal academic credentials. What followed was astonishing—pages filled with mathematical results, some already known, others unfamiliar, and many so original that they defied immediate comprehension. To a trained mathematician, the letter read less like a conventional introduction than a sudden transmission from an unseen and remarkable mind.
Hardy—a rigorous, brilliant mathematician who valued elegance and logical beauty above all—initially regarded the letter with scepticism. He had received similar correspondence from amateurs claiming groundbreaking results, and the work seemed at first like the product of a crank. Yet something made him pause. Some of the formulas were familiar, indicating that the writer had a solid grasp of mathematics. Others were entirely novel, so striking that Hardy could neither verify nor immediately disprove them. That evening, he discussed the letter with his colleague J. E. Littlewood, and together they examined the results late into the night. Hardy later recalled that the work was so extraordinary it could only be true: the insights were far beyond what anyone could fabricate.
The letter from India changed the course of both men’s lives. Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge, handling the practical challenges of funding and, more delicately, Ramanujan’s concerns about crossing the ocean—a journey that many orthodox Brahmins at the time considered spiritually risky. When Ramanujan arrived in England in April 1914, he entered a world completely unfamiliar, with customs, climate, and culture vastly different from anything he had known in India.
Cambridge was cold, gray, and governed by its own strict academic rituals. The shadow of World War I loomed over the city. Ramanujan, a lifelong vegetarian in a culture of meat-eating, struggled to find suitable food. He had never experienced such harsh weather, such profound separation from family and temple, or such distance from the familiar rhythms that had grounded him. Yet intellectually, he felt at home. Hardy offered him something invaluable: a collaborator who could both recognize the brilliance of his intuition and guide him toward formal rigor. Together, they formed a partnership that would become one of the most remarkable and productive in the history of mathematics.
The dynamic between them highlighted a fundamental tension in mathematics itself. Hardy was the formalist, devoted to proof and the careful architecture of logic. Ramanujan was the visionary, arriving at results through intuition and insight that often seemed inexplicable. Hardy famously noted that Ramanujan tended to state results first and provide proofs later—if at all. This both frustrated and fascinated Hardy. How could someone generate results so profound using such unconventional methods? It was, in Hardy’s words, akin to watching a composer create symphonies without ever having learned musical notation.
Together, Hardy and Ramanujan produced groundbreaking work on partition theory—the study of ways to express numbers as sums of other numbers—and made remarkable advances in analytic number theory. Ramanujan’s explorations of the partition function, his contributions to modular forms, and his discovery of the mysterious mock theta functions—whose significance would not be fully understood until decades later—all emerged during these intense years of collaboration. In 1918, Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, becoming only the second Indian to receive this honour, a recognition that placed him among the world’s most eminent mathematicians.
England took a heavy toll on his health. The cold, damp climate and the difficulty of maintaining his strict vegetarian diet in wartime England contributed to a decline in his physical condition. Ramanujan’s health deteriorated significantly over several years, and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency. While medical understanding at the time was limited, later research suggests that his illness may also have involved hepatic amoebiasis, a parasitic infection, rather than tuberculosis alone. By late 1918 and into 1919, he became desperately ill, his weight dropping dramatically, and his clothes often looked too large for him in surviving photographs.
Even during illness, his mind remained active. Hardy once visited Ramanujan in a hospital and mentioned that he had arrived in taxicab number 1729, remarking that it seemed rather dull. Ramanujan immediately replied: “No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways.” Indeed, 1729 = 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³. This anecdote, widely recounted in mathematical lore, exemplifies Ramanujan’s extraordinary intuition—the ability to perceive deep significance in what others might see as ordinary.
In 1919, with his health showing brief signs of improvement, Ramanujan returned to India. He spent his remaining months primarily in Madras, close to family and familiar religious surroundings, where he continued to work despite his failing strength. During this final period, he filled pages with new results—material that would later be identified as part of his “Lost Notebook”, a collection of discoveries found in 1976 and still studied by mathematicians today. But his body continued to weaken. On April 26, 1920, at just thirty-two years old, Srinivasa Ramanujan died, leaving behind a legacy far larger than his short life.
The brevity of his life—barely five years of sustained mathematical collaboration, only thirty-two years in total—makes his legacy all the more astonishing. Ramanujan’s work anticipated ideas that would only later find homes in emerging fields such as theoretical computer science, statistical mechanics, and modern number theory. His formulas later found applications in areas far beyond the mathematics of his time, including quantum physics, black hole theory, and modern cryptography, through developments in modular forms, partition theory, and analytic number theory. Even today, mathematicians continue to prove results he asserted without proof, validate intuitions he recorded in compressed notation, and uncover new consequences of ideas he set down in notebooks more than a century ago.
But perhaps his deepest legacy isn't any particular theorem or formula. It's the reminder that genius takes many forms, that intuition and rigor need not be opposed, that the human mind can access truths through paths we don't fully understand. Ramanujan proved that brilliance can emerge from anywhere, uncredentialed and unexpected, speaking a language all its own. He showed that mathematics, at its highest level, is both discovery and creation, both science and art, both logic and mystery.
In Kumbakonam today, visitors can see the modest house where Ramanujan spent part of his childhood, now preserved as a small museum dedicated to his life and work. Students, scholars, and admirers visit from around the world, standing in the quiet rooms where a young boy once worked through problems on his slate, unaware of how far his ideas would travel. His story endures not despite its improbability, but because of it—a reminder that extraordinary insight can emerge from the most unassuming places, and that the universe sometimes yields its deepest patterns to those who approach it with wonder, devotion, and the courage to trust what they glimpse long before the rest of the world can see it.
Did Ramanujan's story move you? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you found this story inspiring, please share it with someone who appreciates extraordinary lives and the beauty of human potential. Your support helps us tell more stories like this.
More Stories You May Like
