Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in the home of his maternal grandmother in Erode, India, a small town located about 250 miles southwest of Madras. Soon thereafter, his mother returned with her son to her home in Kumbakonam, approximately 160 miles south-southwest of Madras. Ramanujan’s father was a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop, and his mother took in local college students to augment the family’s meager income.
Ramanujan’s mathematical talent was recognized in grammar school, and he won prizes, usually books of English poetry, in recognition of his mathematical skills. At the age of 15, Ramanujan borrowed G. S. Carr’s Synopsis of Pure Mathematics from the local Government College in Kumbakonam. This unusual book, written by a Cambridge tutor to teach students, contained approximately 5,000 theorems, mostly without proofs, and was to serve as Ramanujan’s primary source of mathematical knowledge.
With a scholarship, Ramanujan entered the Government College in...
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Berndt, B.C. (2016). Ramanujan. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7747-7_8839
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