Thread by @VickyChirp

The Man Who Knew Infinity #SrinivasaRamanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu and became obsessed with mathematics as a teen. Ramanujan was a self taught mathematician. He spent so much time making original discoveries in mathematics that he flunked out of college - twice!

He failed thrice in school exams because he did not like to study anything apart from numbers.

At age 12, despite lacking a formal education, he excelled in trigonometry and discovered many theorems.

Srinivasa Ramanujan ran away from home at age of 14 and enrolled at Pachaiyappa's College, Madras.

By 16, he mastered a book called A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and applied Mathematics by Shoobridge Carr, which held a collection of 5000 theorems!

#Ramanujan obtained a scholarship to college but lost it by his poor performance in non-mathematical subjects because he read and studied only mathematics, failing to get degree.
In 1911, he published the first of his paper in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

He was working as a clerk in a post office in India when he wrote to Hardy at the University of Cambridge in 1913.
Somes of these results got Hardy completely astonished.

Hardy invited Ramanujan to Cambridge, and on March 17, 1914 Ramanujan set sail for England

to start one of the most fascinating collaborations in the history of maths.
Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge in April 1914, three Imonths before the outbreak of World War 1.
Within days he had begun work with Hardy and Littlewood.

Two years later, he was awarded the equivalent of a Ph.D. for his work a mere formality.

And in 1918 Ramanujan became the first Indian mathematician to be elected a Fellow of the British Royal Society.

Hardy-Ramanujan number

Once, when Hardy when to visit Ramanujan,he quipped that he ridden in a taxicab with the no. 1729 adding that the no. seemed dull. To which he said that it is a very interesting no., the smallest no. expressible as a sum of 2 cubes in 2 different ways.

In his notebooks, Ramanujan wrote down 17 ways to represent 1/π as an infinite series.

He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptical integrals, hypergeometric series, the equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series, Landau-Ramanujan Constant,

Mock theta function, Ramanujan conjecture, Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan-Soldner constant, Ramanujan theta function, Ramanujan's sum, Ramanujan-Rogers identities, Ramanujan's master theorem, Ramanujan-Sato series.

His theta function lies at the heart of string theory in physics.

Hardy came up with a scale of mathematical ability that went from 0 to 100.
He put himself at 25 and Ramanujan at 100.

In 1917, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent months being cared in nursing homes.
In Feb 1919 he returned to India, but sadly lived for only one more year.
In his short lifetime he produced almost 4000 proofs, identities, conjectures & equations in pure mathematics.

After Srinivasa Ramanujan died, he left 3 notebooks and some pages containing unpublished results that inspired numerous papers by mathematican.