Author: Niharika Bandaru, Grade- VIII, Vista International School, Hyderabad.
National Mathematics Day is celebrated every year on 22 December to remember the birth anniversary of the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his contribution to the field of mathematics.
History of National Mathematics Day
On 22 December 2012, Dr Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India, announced at a function held in Chennai to mark the 125th birth anniversary of the great mathematician Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan, that every year 22 December would be celebrated as National Mathematics Day. Thus, National Mathematics Day is celebrated every year from 22nd December 2012 all over the country.
Importance of National Mathematics Day
The importance of National Mathematics Day is important for everyone, the main objective behind celebrating this day is to increase awareness among people about the importance of mathematics for the development of humanity. On this day, training is also provided to mathematics teachers and students through camps and the development, production, and dissemination of Teaching-Learning Materials for mathematics and research in related fields are highlighted.
Srinivasa Ramanujan and his contribution to Mathematics
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in Erode in Tamil Nadu, India, and died on April 26, 1920, at Kumbhanam. His family was of the Brahmin caste. At the age of 12, he gained knowledge in trigonometry and developed his ideas, without anyone’s help. Only at the age of 15 did he obtain a copy of George Show Bridge Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics. Ramanujan solved regular mathematical problems at the age of ten without any formal training. He was a voracious reader of mathematics that developed his understanding of the subject and the tricks involved to solve the problem. His memory for mathematical formulas, expressions and constants was boundless. Ramanujan worked out trigonometry exercises without any help. He failed to get a degree as he could not manage to get through his other subjects, although he excelled in maths. In 1914, Ramanujan travelled to England 1914 where he was tutored by Hardy with whom he collaborated for some research. The number 1729 is well known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number after he solved the mystery of the number to Hardy when he went to visit him in the hospital. Ramanujan was the first Indian to be selected as a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge. He was the second Indian to be offered a fellowship in the Royal Society. Some of his other works such as the Ramanujan number, Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae, mock theta function, and many more opened new areas for research in the field of mathematics. He worked out 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. In England, Ramanujan made further research, especially in the partition of numbers, that is, the number of ways in which a positive integer can be expressed as the sum of positive integers. Some of his results are still under research. His journal, Ramanujan Journal, was established to keep a record of all his notebooks and results, both published and unpublished, in the field of mathematics.
