Ramanujan Was Born On 22 December 1887 Into A

Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil
Brahmin family in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil

Nadu), at the residence of his maternal grandparents.
[5]
His father, K. Srinivasa Iyengar, worked as a clerk in a
sari shop and hailed fromThanjavur district.[6] His mother,
Komalatammal, was a housewife and also sang at a local
temple.[7] They lived in Sarangapani Street in a traditional
home in the town of Kumbakonam. The family home is
now a museum. When Ramanujan was a year and a half
old, his mother gave birth to a son, Sadagopan, who died
less than three months later. In December 1889,
Ramanujan contracted smallpox, but unlike the thousands
in the Thanjavur district who died of the disease that year,
he recovered.[8] He moved with his mother to her parents'
house in Kanchipuram, near Madras (now Chennai). In
1891 and 1894, his mother gave birth to two more
children, but both died in infancy.
On 1 October 1892, Ramanujan was enrolled at the local
school.[9] After his maternal grandfather lost his job as a
court official in Kanchipuram,[10] Ramanujan and his
mother moved back to Kumbakonam and he was enrolled
in the Kangayan Primary School.[11] When his paternal
grandfather died, he was sent back to his maternal
grandparents, then living in Madras. He did not like school
in Madras, and tried to avoid attending. His family enlisted
a local constable to make sure the boy attended school.
Within six months, Ramanujan was back in Kumbakonam.
[11]
Since Ramanujan's father was at work most of the day, his
mother took care of the boy as a child. He had a close
relationship with her. From her, he learned about tradition
and puranas. He learned to sing religious songs, to attend
pujas at the temple, and to maintain particular eating
habits all of which are part of Brahmin culture.[12] At the
Kangayan Primary School, Ramanujan performed well.
Just before turning 10, in November 1897, he passed his
primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography and
arithmetic with the best scores in the district.[13] That year,
Ramanujan entered Town Higher Secondary School,
where he encountered formal mathematics for the first
time.[13]
By age 11, he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge
of two college students who were lodgers at his home. He
was later lent a book by S. L. Loney on advanced
trigonometry.[14][15] He mastered this by the age of 13 while
discovering sophisticated theorems on his own. By 14, he
was receiving merit certificates and academic awards that
continued throughout his school career, and he assisted
the school in the logistics of assigning its 1200 students
(each with differing needs) to its 35-odd teachers.[16] He
completed mathematical exams in half the allotted time,
and showed a familiarity with geometry and infinite series.
Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in
1902; he developed his own method to solve the quartic.
The following year, not knowing that the quintic could not
be solved by radicals, he tried to do so.
In 1903, when he was 16, Ramanujan obtained from a
friend a library copy of a A Synopsis of Elementary
Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, G. S. Carr's
collection of 5,000 theorems.[17][18] Ramanujan reportedly
studied the contents of the book in detail.[19] The book is
generally acknowledged as a key element in awakening
his genius.[19] The next year, Ramanujan independently
developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and
calculated the EulerMascheroni constant up to 15
decimal places.[20] His peers at the time commented that
they "rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe"
of him.[16]
When he graduated from Town Higher Secondary
School in 1904, Ramanujan was awarded the K.
Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school's
headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. Iyer introduced
Ramanujan as an outstanding student who deserved
scores higher than the maximum.[16] He received a
scholarship to study at Government Arts College,
Kumbakonam,[21][22] but was so intent on mathematics that
he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most
of them, losing his scholarship in the process.[23] In August
1905, Ramanujan ran away from home, heading
towards Visakhapatnam, and stayed in Rajahmundry[24] for
about a month.[25] He later enrolled atPachaiyappa's
College in Madras. There he again excelled in
mathematics but performed poorly in other subjects, such
as physiology. Ramanujan failed his Fellow of Arts exam in
December 1906 and again a year later. Without a degree,
he left college and continued to pursue independent
research in mathematics, living in extreme poverty and
often on the brink of starvation.[26]

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Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil

Brahmin family in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil

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