Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, and died on 26 April 1920 in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu. Largely self-taught and unable to complete a formal university education in India, he worked as a clerk in Madras while continuing his own mathematical research. In January 1913 he wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, introducing his results with the words that he had had no university education but had undergone the ordinary school course; Hardy recognized their brilliance and brought him to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1914. Their collaboration there proved extraordinarily productive across number theory, elliptic functions, continued fractions, infinite series and partition functions, though Hardy also remarked on how startling the limitations of Ramanujan's formal knowledge were alongside its profundity. Ramanujan earned a Cambridge degree by research in 1916, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College in 1918, and returned to India in 1919 in poor health, dying there the following year.