Today's Honorary Subscriber: Show Biography

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 - 1920)

Today's Honorary Subscriber is Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), the great Indian mathematician. Though he had little formal training, Ramanujan made a number of important discoveries, including a way of finding the value of pi. One time Ramanujan shared a taxi with the distinguished English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who noted that the taxi's number was 1729 and remarked that it was "rather a dull number." Ramanujan protested instantly: "No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

Ramanujan was referring to the numbers 12 & 1 and 10 & 9 -- i.e., [12 cubed plus 1 cubed] = [10 cubed plus 9 cubed] = 1729.

Ramanujan, who failed at two colleges because his interest in mathematics made him neglect his other coursework, was working in a clerical position in Madras when he was encouraged to send some of his mathematical ideas to Hardy. Hardy soon realized that he had received the work of a genius, and later, rating himself and other prominent mathematicians on a "pure-talent scale," gave himself 25, his close colleague John E. Littlewood a 30, the great and enormously influential German mathematician David Hilbert an 80, and Ramanujan a 100. Referring once to some of Ramanujan's formulas that he was unable to understand, Hardy said that "they must be true, because if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them."

Ramanujan's genius is referred to in the movie Good Will Hunting [1997], a recommended film -Giles.