Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Man Who Dreamed Equations

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan — the Indian mathematician who taught himself most of modern number theory in the back rooms of a Madras port office, sailed to Cambridge in 1914 with no university degree, and left behind notebooks the world is still reading a hundred years later. This is a long-form sleep biography from Lives Unwritten, part of THE FORGOTTEN sub-series. It traces Ramanujan's life from his birth in 1887 in a small Tamil household, through his self-taught mathematical years, his arrival at Trinity College Cambridge, his partnership with G. H. Hardy, his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918, his return to India, his death at thirty-two, and the fifty-six years of quiet that followed before George Andrews opened a particular box in the Trinity Wren Library in the spring of 1976. It also traces the long, less-told life of Janaki Ammal, who was married to Ramanujan at nine, widowed at twenty-one, and lived another seventy-four years in southern India, watching her husband's reputation grow into something none of them had imagined. SOURCES Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991) G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures & A Mathematician's Apology (1940) D. A. B. Young, "Ramanujan's Illness," Notes and Records of the Royal Society 48 (1994) Bruce Berndt & George Andrews, eds., Ramanujan's Lost Notebook (5 vols) Sander Zwegers, Mock Theta Functions (PhD thesis, Utrecht University, 2002) Don Zagier, Bourbaki seminar on Zwegers's work (2007) Ken Ono et al., Harmonic Maass Forms and Mock Modular Forms (AMS, 2017) Trinity College Wren Library archives