A tribute to the legend of the legends: Srinivas Ramanujan
(The picture above is taken from a stamp issued by the Indian Post Office to celebrate the 75th anniversary of his birth.) Srinivasa Ramanujan (श्रीनिवास रामानुजन), the man who knew infinity, an exceptionally gifted young Indian mathematician , who shook the whole world with his theories that still are mystery to present day mathematicians. He was born in a Brahmin family in Erode,Madras (now Chennai) on the date 22 December 1887 . His father worked as a clerk in a cloth merchant's shop. Ramanujan entered the Town High School in Kumbakonam in January 1898 . In 1900 he began to work on his own on mathematics summing geometric and arithmetic series. Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902 and he went on to find his own method to solve the quartic. The following year,he tried to solve the quintic that could not be solved even by radicals. It was in the Town High School that Ramanujan came across a mathematics book by G S Carr called Synopsis of elementary re