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Ramanujan was born in December 22, 1887 in Erode a small village about 400 km southwest of Madras, Tamil Nadu , India, at the place of residence of his maternal grandparents. His father, K.Srinivasa Iyengar worked as an accountant in a cloth merchant's shop. His mother, Komalatammal was a housewife. They lived in Saarangapani Street in a south-Indian-style home(now a museum) in the town of Kumbakonam. In 1898, at the age of 10, Ramanujan entered the Town High School, THSS, where he encountered formal mathematics for the first time. By the age of 11, he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students, who were lodgers at his home. |
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Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902 and he was able to find his own method to solve the quartic. The following year, not knowing that the quintic could not be solved by radicals, he tried(and of course failed) to solve the quintic. He was later lent advanced trigonometry written by S.L. Loney and he completely mastered this book by the age of 13 and was discovering sophisticated theorems of his own. By 14 his true genius was evident. He achieved merit certificates and academic awards throughout his school career and was also assisting the school in the logistics of assigning its 1200 students to its 35-odd teachers, completing mathematical exams in half the allotted time, and showing familiarity with infinite series. When he was sixteen and in the sixth form, he came across ``A synopsis of elementary results in pure and applied mathematics ", by George Carr. This book, a collection of 6000 theorems, served to introduce Ramanujan to the real world of mathematics. Ramanujan received a scholarship to study at Government College in Kumbakonam but was so intent on studying mathematics that he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process. He failed again in the next college he joined but continued to pursue independent research in mathematics. At this point in his life, he lived in extreme poverty and was often near the point of starvation.
source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Ramanujan.html