Born on December 22
Srinivasa Ramanujan's Birthday
The clerk whose letter astonished Cambridge.
Next: December 22, 2026
Where it comes from
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode, in today's Tamil Nadu, on 22 December 1887, and this Story marks his birthday. Largely self-taught, he was a clerk at the Madras Port Trust when, in January 1913, he wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy with more than a hundred theorems.
How it's celebrated
Since 2012 India has kept his birthday as National Mathematics Day, marked by schools, colleges and science institutions across the country. Anywhere else it is a good day to set someone a puzzle, or to look again at a number you think is dull: Ramanujan rarely met one.
Did you know
Visiting him in hospital, Hardy remarked that his taxi's number, 1729, seemed dull; Ramanujan replied that it was the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
Read the full story of Srinivasa Ramanujan's Birthday
Star sign
Capricorn · December 22 – January 19 · Earth sign
Patient and ambitious, climbing steadily to the top.