How do I know more about the works of Srinivas Ramanujan?

Answer 1

check this books out:
-Ramanujan : letters and commentary
by Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar; Bruce C Berndt; Robert A Rankin
- Collected papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan
by Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar; G H Hardy; P V Seshu Aiyar; B M Wilson
I am sure you can get them through your library,

Srinivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujan (Tamil: ஸ்ரீனிவாஸ ஐயங்கார் ராமானுஜன்) (December 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920) was an Indian Tamil mathematician who excelled in the heuristic aspects of number theory and insight into modular functions. He also made significant contributions to the development of partition functions and summation formulas involving constants such as π.

A child prodigy, he was largely self-taught in mathematics and had compiled over 3,000 theorems between 1914 and 1918 at the University of Cambridge. Often, his formulas were merely stated, without proof, and were only later proven to be true. His results were highly original and unconventional, and have inspired a large amount of research and many mathematical papers; however, some of his discoveries have been slow to enter the mathematical mainstream. Recently his formulae have started to be applied in the field of crystallography, and other applications in physics. The Ramanujan Journal was launched to publish work "in areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan".

Childhood and early life

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, India, the place of residence of his maternal grandparents. His father hailed from the fertile Kumbakonam-Tanjore district. They lived in Saarangapani Street in a typical south Indian styled house (it is now a museum). His mother is believed to have been well-educated in Indian mathematics and Ramanujan is conjectured by some to have received similar education as well [1]. In 1898, at age 10, he entered the town high school, THSS in Kumbakonam [2], where he may have encountered formal mathematics for the first time. By the age of 11 he had devoured the mathematical knowledge of two lodgers at his home, both students at the Government College, and was lent books on advanced trigonometry written by S.L.Loney (ISBN 1418185094), which he mastered by age 13. His biographer reports that by 14 his true genius was beginning to become discernible. Not only did he achieve merit certificates and academic awards throughout his school career, he was also assisting the school in the logistics of assigning its 1200 students (each with their own needs) to its 35-odd teachers, completing mathematical exams in half the allotted time, and was showing familiarity with infinite series. His peers of the time commented later, "We, including teachers, rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe" of him. However, Ramanujan could not concentrate on other subjects and failed his high school exams. By age 17, he calculated Euler's constant to 15 decimal places. He began to study what he thought was a new class of numbers, but instead he had independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers. At this time in his life, he was quite poor and was often near the point of starvation.

[edit] Adulthood in India

After his marriage (on July 14, 1909) he began searching for work. With his packet of mathematical calculations, he travelled around the city of Madras (now Chennai) looking for a clerical position. He managed finally to get a job at the Accountant General's Office at Madras. Ramanujan desired to focus completely on mathematics, and was advised by an Englishman to contact scholars in Cambridge. He doggedly solicited support from influential Indian individuals and published several papers in Indian mathematical journals, but was unsuccessful in his attempts to foster sponsorship. (It might be the case that he was supported by R.Ramachandra Rao, then the Collector of the Nellore District and a distinguished civil servant. Ramachandra Rao, an amateur mathematician himself was the uncle of the well known mathematician, K. Ananda Rao, who went on to become the Principal of the Presidency college.) It was at this point that Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee tried to bolster his cause.

In late 1912 and early 1913 Ramanujan sent letters and examples of his theorems to three Cambridge academics: H. F. Baker, E. W. Hobson, and G. H. Hardy. Only Hardy, to whom Ramanujan wrote in January 1913, recognized the genius demonstrated by the theorems.

Upon reading the initial unsolicited missive by an unknown and untrained Indian mathematician, Hardy and his colleague J.E. Littlewood commented that, “not one [theorem] could have been set in the most advanced mathematical examination in the world.” Although Hardy was one of the pre-eminent mathematicians of his day and an expert in a number of the fields Ramanujan was writing about, he commented, "many of them defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before."

[edit] Life in England

After some initial skepticism, Hardy replied with comments, requesting proofs for some of the discoveries, and began to make plans to bring Ramanujan to England. As an orthodox Brahmin, Ramanujan consulted the astrological data for his journey, because of religious concerns that he would lose his caste by traveling to foreign shores. However, Ramanujan's mother said that she had a dream in which the family goddess told her not to stand in the way of her son's travel, so he made plans accordingly, although he took pains to keep a proper Brahmin lifestyle as far as he could.

Hardy said of Ramanujan's formulae, some of which he could not initially understand, "a single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true, for if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them." Hardy stated in an interview by Paul Erdős that his own greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan, and compared Ramanujan to the mathematical giants Euler and Jacobi. Ramanujan was later appointed a Fellow of Trinity, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).

Some would find Ramanujan scribbling equations in his notebook continuously for more than 30 hours and then collapsing to sleep for 20 hours. This type of irregularity in day to-day activities took a heavy toll on his health.[3]

[edit] Illness and return to India

Plagued by health problems all of his life, living in a country far from home, and obsessively involved with his studies, Ramanujan's health worsened in England, perhaps exacerbated by stress, and by the scarcity of vegetarian food during the First World War. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis (Henderson, 1996) and a severe vitamin deficiency, although a 1994 analysis of Ramanujan's medical records and symptoms by Dr. D.A.B Young concluded that it was much more likely he had hepatic amoebiasis, a parasitic infection of the liver. This is also supported by the fact that Ramanujan had spent time in Madras, where the disease was widespread. It was a difficult disease to diagnose, but once diagnosed was readily curable (Berndt, 1998). He returned to India in 1919 and died soon after in Kumbakonam, his final gift to the world being the discovery of 'mock theta functions'. His wife, S. Janaki Ammal, lived outside Chennai (formerly Madras) until her death in 1994.

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Answer 2

Srinivasa ramanujan

Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in a poor family of madras. He did not receive proper education but he had great interest in mathematics, he tried his own ideas to solve problems.
He worked on elliptical functions, continued fraction, infinite series and hyper geometric series. He was invited to improve his works by G. h. hardy and j e Littlewood who were two great mathematicians at that time. He died on 26 aipril 1920. on 22nd December(his birthday) is celebrated as national maths day.

Answer 3

Here's another idea. Go to e-bay and look for books about Ramanujan. I am sure you will find not only biographies, but also analyses of his work. Ramanujan was quite a remarkable character who, though largely self-taught, did a great deal of mathematics in his short life. He died at only about the age of 32.

Answer 4

Try reading his notebooks (edited), you might be able to get them on a free download or at a good math library.

If you just want a biography try wikipedia.org
the links on the wiki page are sure to be helpful

Answer 5

there are a number of sites with information on him.
google it