Srinivasa Ramanujan born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. He was born into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, in present-day Tamil Nadu. His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, originally from Thanjavur district, worked as a clerk in a sari shop. His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and sang at a local temple. Ramanujan’s mother took care of him, and they had a close relationship. From her, he learned about tradition and puranas, to sing religious songs, to attend pujas at the temple.

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.

When he was 15 years old, he obtained a copy of George Shoobridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. (1880–86). This collection of thousands of theorems, many presented with only the briefest of proofs and with no material newer than 1860, aroused his genius. Having verified the results in Carr’s book, Ramanujan went beyond it, developing his own theorems and ideas. In 1903 he secured a scholarship to the University of Madras but lost it the following year because he neglected all other studies in pursuit of mathematics.

Ramanujan continued his work, without employment and living in the poorest circumstances. After marrying in 1909 he began a search for permanent employment that culminated in an interview with a government official, Ramachandra Rao. Impressed by Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess, Rao supported his research for a time, but Ramanujan, unwilling to exist on charity, obtained a clerical post with the Madras Port Trust.

In 1911 Ramanujan published the first of his papers in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. His genius slowly gained recognition, and in 1913 he began a correspondence with the British mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy that led to a special scholarship from the University of Madras and a grant from Trinity College, Cambridge. Overcoming his religious objections, Ramanujan traveled to England in 1914, where Hardy tutored him and collaborated with him in some research. See full Bio at Wiki

Ramanujan’s knowledge of mathematics (most of which he had worked out for himself) was startling. Although he was almost completely unaware of modern developments in mathematics, his mastery of continued fractions was unequaled by any living mathematician. He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series, in which he found a value for the sum of such series using a technique he invented that came to be called Ramanujan summation. On the other hand, he knew nothing of doubly periodic functions, the classical theory of quadratic forms, or Cauchy’s theorem, and he had only the most nebulous idea of what constitutes a mathematical proof. Though brilliant, many of his theorems on the theory of prime numbers were wrong.

In England Ramanujan made further advances, especially in the partition of numbers (the number of ways that a positive integer can be expressed as the sum of positive integers; e.g., 4 can be expressed as 4, 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1). His papers were published in English and European journals, and in 1918 he was elected to the Royal Society of London. In 1917 Ramanujan had contracted tuberculosis, but his condition improved sufficiently for him to return to India in 1919. He died the following year, generally unknown to the world at large but recognized by mathematicians as a phenomenal genius, without peer since Leonhard Euler (1707–83) and Carl Jacobi (1804–51). Ramanujan left behind three notebooks and a sheaf of pages (also called the “lost notebook”) containing many unpublished results that mathematicians continued to verify long after his death.

Goddess Namgiri –

According to his biography, Ramnujan went to Namakkal with Narayana Iyer from Madras prior to his departure to Cambridge in January 1914. Ramanujan prayed to the goddess Namagiri by sitting in the center of a four pillared mandapam facing the goddess, in the Narasimha swamy Temple.

It is said that he stayed in the precincts of the temple for three days, and Ramanujan got the permission of the goddess to go to England, in a dream when he was asleep. He woke Narayana Iyer and told him that his mission of getting the permission of the goddess to go to England was accomplished.

Ramanujan claimed to have dream of blood drops, after which, he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.  “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”
He said once “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.“

Birth Chart of Srinivas Ramanujan –