A thread on Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS: 
Born in Erode, Madras Presidency, British India (Now Tamil Nadu) on the 22nd of December 1887, he was the son of a Clerk and a singer at a local Temple, who all lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam.
After moving around alot he was eventually sent back to Madras after his Paternal Grandfather had passed away. He did not like his school in Madras and often avoided attending, because of this, his family had to enlist a local constable to make sure he attended.
He had a very close relationship with his mother as his father was not around alot and so from her he learned: to sing devotional songs, the puranas and how to perform puja at the local Temple. At age 11 he had exhausted all the mathematical knowledge of the two college students
who were lodgers at his home, and so because of this and his other achievements, he was deemed to be a child prodigy. He was sent multiple theorems, books on complex mathematics and had mastered them all at the ages of 13 and 14. He was so brilliant, that he developed his own...
theorems, completed mathematics exams in half the allotted time and helped his school in any logistics work involving complex mathematical formulas. Due to him only being focused in a research career in Mathematics, it led to him failing his FA degree and so he left...
to pursue independent research in Mathematics while living in extreme poverty and often on the brink of starvation. He finally became a researcher, after gaining recognition in the mathematics circles, at the University of Madras. After his marriage, he was in search of a job...
at the revenue department, where V. Ramaswamy Iyer worked. Because of Iyer's connections in the Mathematics circles, he sent his work to many notable professors who deemed his work as extraordinary, and some even doubted their owm academic integrity. One person in particular...
, Ramachandra Rao, presented Ramanujan's work to many British Mathematicians, who either returned his work without comment or were critical of his actual understanding of the basis of his theorems. However, G.H Hardy and Gilbert Walker, at Trinity College, University of Cambridge
expressed amazement at his work and wanted to him to spend time at Cambridge. Ramanujan, reluctantly, came to England, leaving his wife and parents in India. Ramanujan began to work with Hardy and J.E Littlewood, and they both found that, some of his works were either new..
breakthroughs or previously discovered findings. He left a deep impression on Hardy and Littlewood, with Hardy even comparing him to 2 great mathematicians, Euler and Jacobi. However, it was not all easy going for Ramunajan, he often found it hard to work with Hardy due..
to the clash of cultures and personalities, with Hardy being a staunch atheist and Ramunajan being a deeply religious Hindu who relied deeply on his own intuition and insights. Ramanujan had credited his acumen to his family Goddess Namagiri Thayar and said that he would recieve
visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content from God. He later graduated with a BSc (later renamed to a PhD) in 1916 from The University of Cambridge after releasing his 50 page long thesis on 'highly complex composite numbers', with the first part being published as a...
paper in the Proceedings of The London Mathematical Society. In 1918, at the age of 31, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, being the 2nd Indian admitted after Ardaseer Cursetjee. He was elected for his investigations in elliptical functions and the theory of...
numbers. Ramanujan was plagued with health problems since he was a teenager and he was later diagnosed with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency. In 1920, at the age of 32, he passed away with his brother compiling the rest of his handwritten notes on various formulae.
