Ramanujan literally, “younger brother of Rama”, a Hindu deity was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode during the British Colonial Rule (present-day Tamil Nadu, India), at the residence of his maternal grandparents. His father’s name was K. Srinivasa Iyengar and his mother’s name was Komalatammal.

Ramanujan was always ahead of the formal education that was taught during his time. His passion for numbers, therefore, not only took him ahead of everyone else his age but also in a completely different direction. He was 11 when he imbibed all the mathematical knowledge of two college students lodging in his home. At 13, he grasped advanced trigonometry and began devising theories of his own. When he was 16, he chanced upon GS Carr’s collection of 5,000 theorems presented without proof – a challenge that was irresistible to our prodigy. He thoroughly studied them and devised his ways of arriving at results. That means that we learned to be self-taught and hence, self-reliable.

Ramanujan lived a short life, but he did so richly among the numbers he loved so very much. His colleague at Cambridge University, JE Littlewood, remarked that “every positive integer was one of his personal friends,” a remark that effectively summarises his ingenuity and personality in a few simple words. In 1920 he died at age 32, generally unknown to the world but recognized by mathematicians as a phenomenal genius.