Srinivasa Ramanujan's Birthday
Next: December 22, 2026
The clerk whose letter astonished Cambridge.
The story
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. Hardy at first suspected a hoax, then decided the writer was 'a mathematician of the highest quality' and brought him to Cambridge in 1914. Ramanujan died in 1920, aged 32, leaving notebooks that mathematicians still study.
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.
- In 1918 he was elected both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
- The book that taught him, G. S. Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics, was a terse list of theorems with short proofs, and its style shaped the way he wrote mathematics.
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