Srinivasa Ramanujan

Born on December 22, 1887, Srinivasa Ramanujan hailed from a high caste Aiyangar Brahmin, but poor family.
He was interested in Mathematics from his very childhood. As a child he was curious about cosmology and calculated the equatorial length all by himself.
When Godfrey Hardy, a renowned Cambridge mathematician received a letter from Ramanujan regarding his opinion on 120 mathematical theorems that Ramanujan had discovered, Hardy shoved the letter aside considering Ramanujan to be some kind of a fraud. However while assessing the theorems later with fellow mathematician J.E.Littlewood, he came to realize the genius of Ramanujan. Those 120 theorems had to be true as Hardy claimed later saying “no one would have had the imagination to invent them.”
On April 1914, Ramanujan arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, a few months before World War I began. His next three years at Cambridge were extremely fruitful. However in 1917, he was not keeping well. Doctors suspected it to be Tuberculosis and severe vitamin deficiency. His health would have improved if he returned home but the threat of war kept him from travelling and he was continuously being admitted to the hospital in vain, seeking a cure.
Once visiting Ramanujan at a nursing home in London, Hardy started talking trivialities like the number of the taxi he had come in. He said “It was 1729″, and “It seemed to me rather a dull number.” On hearing this Ramanujan protested, “No Hardy, no Hardy.” He explained, “It is a very interesting number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” – This was Ramanujan, a man suffering from acute ill health thought only on his work and his favourite subject, mathematics.
Besides his illness, something more was troubling him. He had realized that a great deal of his work in India was merely a rediscovery of what mathematicians in Europe had already achieved. What wastage of his precious time! His accomplishments in England did not make up for this loss. Depressed and troubled he tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of an underground train in London. Luckily the train stopped in time but he was arrested and hardy came in time to save him. It is surprising that Ramanujan never thought of his own profit or any material gains but it was that his work would remain unfinished was troubling him more.
Soon afterwards Ramanujan received two unique awards. He was elected to the Royal society – the second Indian to be so honoured. And a few months later, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He died in April 26, 1920. In his work he was ahead of his time and it is in recent years that his work have helped in solving problems in computer science, physics, in cancer research and polymer chemistry – problems that he had no inkling of. Professor Richard Askey of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA once said, “It’s a shame Ramanujan wasn’t born a hundred years later.”