Story
Largely self-taught, Ramanujan of Kumbakonam produced nearly 3,900 results in a short life of 32 years. Working with G. H. Hardy at Cambridge, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918. His birthday, 22 December, is National Mathematics Day.
Key contributions
- Hardy–Ramanujan formula for the number of partitions of an integer
- Remarkable infinite series for 1/π, used in modern computer calculations of π
- Mock theta functions, still inspiring research today
- 1729, the 'Hardy–Ramanujan number'