Author: Tamanna Sharma, Grade- VII, Vista international School, Hyderabad.
Indian Mathematics Day, on December 22, celebrates the birth anniversary of India’s famed mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan who lived during British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems than were considered unsolvable.
Ramanujan’s knowledge of mathematics (most of which he had worked out for himself) was startling. Although he was almost completely unaware of modern developments in mathematics, his mastery of continued fractions was unequalled by any living mathematician. He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, the hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his theory of divergent series, in which he found a value for the sum of such series using a technique he invented that came to be called Ramanujan summation. His family was of the Brahmin caste but of modest means. The British colonial rulers of India had put in place a very structured system of schools, and by age 10 Ramanujan stood out by scoring top in his district in the standard exams.
