Why Do We Celebrate National Mathematics Day?

The Indian government declared 22 December to be National Mathematics Day to perceive the accomplishments of the Indian Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan who was born on this date in 1887. Previous Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh had pronounced December 22 as National Mathematics Day on 26th February 2012 at Madras University.

Who was Srinivasa Ramanujan?

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu. He was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. His life story, with its humble and sometimes difficult beginnings, is as interesting as his astonishing work. At the small age of 12, he had excelled at trigonometry and developed many theorems by himself despite lacking a formal education. In 1904, Ramanujan enrolled in the Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but could not secure the same since he failed in non-mathematical subjects. In the year 1914, GH Hardy got him into Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the year 1917, Ramanujan became a member of the London Mathematical Society.

Srinivasa Ramanujan Contributions to Mathematics

Ramanujan’s has been regarded as a mathematical genius because

• He made advances in the partition function.
• Mastery of continued fractions.
• He wrote down 17 ways to represent 1/pi as an infinite series.
• Taxicab Numbers/ Hardy- Ramanujan Number – The name is derived from a conversation in about 1919 involving mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan/ Taxicab Number. It is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two positive integer cubes in n distinct ways. The most famous taxicab number is 1729 = Ta(2) = 13 + 123 = 93 + 103.
• He had also worked out the Riemann series, Elliptic integrals, Hypergeometric series, and the functional equations of the zeta function.
• Srinivasa Ramanujan left three notebooks and some pages behind containing unpublished results.