#continuedfractions

It's December 22nd, 🧮 National Mathematics Day in India. On this day in 1887, the brilliant mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode, Tamil Nadu. Ramanujan was responsible for advances in number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems until then considered unsolvable. Schools and universities throughout India celebrate his birthday now with math contests, games, demonstrations, and other educational events. In 2017, the day’s significance was enhanced by the opening of the Ramanujan Math Park in Kuppam, Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh.

Ramunajan's genius was obvious from childhood. By the age of 12, he had mastered trigonometry and developed many of his own theorems. Ramanujan’s peers at the time said they rarely understood him and stood in respectful awe of him, but his ideas were too novel for the leading mathematicians in India to be bothered with.

In 1913, when Ramanujan was 25, British mathematician G.H. Hardy became enamored with his theorems and got him into Cambridge University. Ramanujan thrived in Britain and was soon elected to be a member of the London Mathematical Society. In 1918, at the age of 30, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society – one of the youngest persons to ever achieve this esteemed position.

Ramanujan returned to India in 1919 because the food in Britain didn't agree with him. His health continued to deteriorate, and he died in 1920 at the tender age of 32. His achievements in mathematics, however, continue to live on and grow ever larger. His notebooks of unpublished material are a source of new ideas to this day. Of his thousands of theorems, all but a dozen or so have by now been proven correct. A century after his death, researchers are still discovering that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" were themselves profound and subtle number theory results.