Ramanujan was a wonder kid, and a mathematical genius. Irrespective of having no proper formal education towards advance mathematics, he ended up being a mathematical genius! Ramanujan was an Indian Mathematician who born in December 22, 1987 in Erode. He couldn't live for long, he died at a very young age at 32 in India. Even though Ramanujan's life was short, his contributions to mathematics were extensive. His massive amount of research and contribution towards mathematics made him the Mozart of mathematics! A Hollywood movie based on his life-story was published in the year 2014 named "Man Who Knew Infinity" which features his life-story from how he pursued everything and reached in Trinity College. However, how well do you know this great man? Not at all? So, here are 7 most interesting facts about the Srinivasa Ramanujan, who found life and romance in the beauty of numbers and theorems!
- Ramanujan was a lonely child in school as his peers could never understand him.
- He belonged from a poor family and used to write on slate instead of writing on paper to evaluate the results of his derivations.
- When Ramanujan was thirteen, he could work out Loney’s Trigonometry exercises without any help!
- He did not receive any formal training in pure mathematics! Ramanujan did not possess a college degree.
- G.H. Hardy was the men who brought Ramanujan into England Cambridge, Trinity College.
- 22nd December is called National Mathematics Day in India because of Ramanujan's birth-anniversary!
- Google honored him on his 125th birth anniversary by replacing its logo with a doodle on its home page.
- A biographical film based on Ramanujan life was released in the year 2014 by Hollywood, "The men who knew infinity".
- Ramanujan is as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He used to cred his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Afterward he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes. He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God." Hardy cites Ramanujan as remarking that all religions seemed equally true to him.
- After a funny incident, 1729 is called Hardy-Ramanujam number in his honor, and such numbers are called Taxicab numbers.
One day, when Ramanujan was ill G.H. Hardy went to visit his friend Ramanujan by a "Taxicab". Both men were mathematicians and liked to think about numbers. When Ramanujan heard that Hardy had come in a taxi he asked him "what the number of the taxi?"
Hardy Replied:- It was just a boring number: 1729.
Ramanujan replied:- 1729 was not a boring number. In fact, it was a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways"
Hardy asked Ramanujan to explain him "How 1729 is an interesting number"?
He explained that it was the smallest number that could be expressed by the sum of two cubes in two different ways. This story is very famous among mathematicians. 1729 is sometimes called the “Hardy-Ramanujan number”.
There are two ways to say that 1729 is the sum of two cubes.
1 x 1 x 1 = 1; 12 x 12 x 12 = 1728.
So 1 + 1728 = 1729
But also: 9 x 9 x 9 = 729; 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000. So 729 + 1000 = 1729
There are other numbers that can be shown to be the sum of two cubes in more than one way, but 1729 is the smallest of them.
Ramanujan did not actually discover this fact. It was known in 1657 by a French mathematician Bernard Frénicle de Bessy. But it got famous after the ramanujans above conversation. So it's famously known as Ramanujan Number. It is also known as taxi cab number.
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