Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician

This is the moving story of the life of Ramanujan the great Indian mathematical genius who appeared suddenly as a meteor in 1887, rushed through a short span of thirty-two years, consumed himself and disappeared with equal suddenness. At the age of thirteen, he had mastered Loney's Trigonometry and even calculated the length of the equator of the earth.   Son of a clerk in a cloth merchant's shop in Kumbakonam, before he was 23, had filled a whole notebook with hundreds of mathematical theorems and results, in spite of poverty, unemployment and absence of anyone who could understand his work. Many of the theorems were new to the mathematical world and some have not yet been proved. The book unfolds in quick succession, the chief events of his life beginning with his search in 1911 for a clerical post, always carrying his notebook under his arm, to his sailing to England in 1914 and his return home in 1919. In Cambridge he was soon acknowledged to be the most remarkable mathematician of our times and was elected a fellow of the Trinity College of Cambridge and a fellow of the royal society at the early age of thirty. The book contains the reminiscences of several surviving contemporaries of Ramanujan. It highlights his penetrating intuition and childlike simplicity. He was a 'seer' in mathematics. Though agnostic in arguments, he was ever conscious of the immanence of God.