Math Genius Ramanujan’s Birthday is National Mathematics Day

Every year the birth anniversary of legendary Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan on December 22 is observed as National Mathematics Day.

On February 26, 2012, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared December 22 as the National Mathematics Day to mark the birth anniversary of this great Indian mathematician.

He is best known for his contributions to the theory of numbers. In an extremely small life span of 32 years, Ramanujan has startled the world with his mathematical genius. He was born on December 22, 1887, in Erode of Tamil Nadu’s Erode.

Ramanujan studied at Government College in Kumbhakonam. He failed college exams as he had little interest in subjects other than mathematics. His first article got published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society in 1911. Getting a scholarship, he travelled to England in 1914 to study and work with British mathematician Godfrey H Hardy.

Ramanujan’s mastery of continued fractions was magical. He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, the hypergeometric series, and functional equations of the zeta function using his own technique that came to be called Ramanujan Summation.

Srinivasa Ramanujan is also known as the ‘man who knew infinity’.

In 1919, he returned to India due to his poor health, and a year later, on April 26, 1920, he passed away at the age of 32.