Beautiful Minds

If you have ever watched “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, you have subconsciously studied the genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Being a self-taught mathematician in colonial India during the early 1900s was hardly the kind of career choice parents bragged about at the temple. Jobs were scarce, resources scarcer, and formal training scarcer still. Yet Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, born in Erode in 1887 and raised in Kumbakonam, simply couldn’t stop thinking about numbers, so he didn’t. By his mid‑twenties, he had filled notebooks with more than 3,000 theorems, identities, and conjectures before ever setting foot in Cambridge (“Srinivasa Ramanujan”).

Inspired by a battered 1886 math compendium he found as a teenager, Ramanujan taught himself everything from infinite series to elliptic integrals, often skipping proofs and writing down what “just felt right.” His intuition was so sharp that G. H. Hardy, arguably Britain’s premier pure mathematician, declared Ramanujan “a mathematician of the highest class” after receiving a letter stuffed with results he could barely wrap his rigor‑loving head around (Kanigel).

Infinity was always a fascinating concept to me. Ramanujan piqued my interest in this never-ending number, and I have further delved into the distinction of countable and uncountable infinities. Infinity is important for defining several different groups of numbers, such as real numbers. 

When I researched the concept of the infinite Hilbert Hotel, I was intrigued about how a hotel with infinite rooms couldn’t house an infinite number of people whose names were made up with an infinite combination of two characters, because of the difference between countable and uncountable infinities. The Hilbert Hotel only holds a countable infinity of guests, while the number of people trying to get a room with names that are made up of an infinite combination of two characters is an uncountable infinity. 

Ramanujan developed the formula for the infinite series that many kids participating in mathematics competitions, such as the AMCs take for granted today: S (summation) = a/(1-r). Several complex calculations involving infinite strings of numbers that have some sort of common ratio between them can be solved in a fraction of the usual time because of Ramanujan’s innovation. 

Despite all of these great discoveries, Ramanujan’s greatest legacy lies with the partition function p(n), which counts how many ways a positive integer n can be written as a sum of positive integers, order ignored. Together with Hardy, he devised the first accurate asymptotic for p(n), an eye‑popping formula that still wows combinatorialists and string theorists alike (Murty).

He also unearthed spectacular congruences and left behind the mysterious continued-fraction identities and mock theta functions that have fueled entire subfields since his death (Dutta et al.).

Ramanujan’s whirlwind five-year collaboration in England produced nearly forty papers, election to the Royal Society, and enough unfinished ideas to keep mathematicians busy for a century. Yet he battled poverty, chronic illness, and racial isolation the whole way, returning to India in 1919 only to die the next year at age 32 (Kanigel).

His story is a reminder that genius can bloom far from elite classrooms, but nurturing that genius demands inclusive institutions and global collaboration. As we celebrate his intuitive leaps, we’d do well to ask how many other Ramanujans we’re overlooking today.

Works Cited

Hardy, G. H., and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Cambridge University Press, 1927.

Kanigel, Robert. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Scribner, 1991.

“1729 (Number).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 May 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number). Accessed 3 June 2025.

“Srinivasa Ramanujan.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 May 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan. Accessed 3 June 2025.

Murty, M. Ram. “The Partition Function Revisited.” Queen’s University, 2014, mast.queensu.ca/~murty/Partition_Function_Paper.pdf. Accessed 3 June 2025.

Dutta, L., et al. “Ramanujan and Partitions.” International Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 2005, emis.de/journals/IMSC/Ramanujan_and_Partitions.pdf. Accessed 3 June 2025.