One of the people who has come closest to eternity in finite life: Who is Srinivasa Ramanujan?

The Man Who Knew Infinity, written by Robert Kanigel and later transferred to the big screen, made us meet this brilliant mathematician. The most important factor in his life story reaching us was, of course, the mathematician G. H. Hardy and the books he wrote.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in Tamil Nadu, India. He grew up in a house in the Indian town of Kumbakonam, which today has been turned into a museum to symbolize his achievements. He lost his siblings to smallpox at a young age. Struggling with poverty, his family was able to offer him a basic education.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.

By the age of eleven, he had a college-level knowledge of mathematics and had begun to develop mathematical theorems. His area of interest was mostly focused on geometry and infinite series. When Ramanujan was fifteen, he showed how to solve a cubic equation. He developed his own technique for solving quadratic equations.

In 1903, when Srinivasa Ramanujan was sixteen, he came across a book called Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics. The book was originally a textbook and contained thousands of results, formulas, and equations without proof. Ramanujan, who learned theoretical mathematics for the first time from this book, did not feel the need to make a proof during his life, perhaps for this reason.

Ramanujan, who was not interested in any subject other than mathematics, left school in the following period. While struggling with poverty and hunger, he also continued his work. In 1909, he married a girl chosen by his mother, who was only ten years old at the time. It was an Indian tradition and considered quite commonplace.

Now with family responsibilities, Ramanujan was looking for a job, especially an office job. He sustained himself by teaching for a while. Finally, in May 1913, he took up a research position at the University of Madras and moved with his family to Triplicane. To understand Ramanujan's genius, as an example, it is sufficient to take a look at the formulas he developed to obtain the value of the number π.

Ramanujan worked hard to make his work known to the professional mathematical world, for which he wrote dozens of letters. He received no positive response but continued to write. Some of the English mathematicians did not even reply to his letters, claiming that he had no formal training.

Fascinated by the book Orders of Infinity in 1913, Ramanujan wrote a letter to the book's author, the famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy (1877–1947). Once again, he stated in his letter that he lacked formal training, but this time he included some examples of his work in the letter.

Hardy initially paid no attention to this letter, which was filled with unreliable claims and strange theorems that were not supported by any evidence. But something about the letter, perhaps its extreme strangeness, tempted Hardy. After studying the letter for three hours, Hardy and his colleague Littlewood finally decided they were dealing with a genius. Hardy wrote to Ramanujan asking him to send some proofs. However, Ramanujan could not provide these proofs because they did not exist. Instead, he sent even more results in his next letter, again without proof.

When Ramanujan was alive, no one even knew that black holes were something to study. However, Srinivasa Ramanujan unwittingly developed some of the first formulas used to explain the properties of black holes. For this reason, those who work on number theory today continue their research on the formulas that Ramanujan wrote in his notebooks.