Ramanujan flunked college and hunted clerk jobs before his notebooks got noticed
Srinivasa Ramanujan won a college scholarship in 1904 and promptly lost it, because he could not make himself study anything except mathematics and failed most other subjects. A few years later he was walking door to door around Madras asking for clerical work, carrying notebooks full of results nobody had ever seen.
The breakthrough came in 1910, when he showed those notebooks to V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, a revenue official and founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, hoping for a junior job in his department. Aiyer later recalled being struck by the extraordinary results and deciding he would not bury such talent at the bottom rung of the revenue office. Instead he sent Ramanujan with introductions to mathematician friends. One of them, R. Ramachandra Rao, at first doubted the work was really his own before agreeing to support him.
The gift had shown early. Born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, in today's Tamil Nadu, to a sari-shop clerk and a mother who sang at the local temple, he had by age 11 exhausted what two college students lodging in his home could teach him. At 16 he borrowed G. S. Carr's compilation of 5,000 theorems and studied it closely, and the following year he explored the Bernoulli numbers on his own and computed the Euler–Mascheroni constant to 15 decimal places.
Established mathematicians mostly ignored his letters, finding his work too unfamiliar and oddly presented. In 1913 he wrote to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge, who saw that some of the theorems had defeated him completely and arranged for Ramanujan to come to England. Over his life he compiled nearly 3,900 results, including partition formulas and mock theta functions, most since proven correct.
Illness, now thought to be a liver infection left over from earlier bouts of dysentery, sent him home to India in 1919. He died on 26 April 1920, only 32, still sending Hardy fresh ideas in his final months. A lost notebook from his last year surfaced in 1976 and thrilled mathematicians, and a journal now publishes research that grows out of his work.
Source: Srinivasa Ramanujan
