Ramanujan by Gouri Ambika

Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the greatest Mathematicians. He was known for his uncanny intuition in working with infinite series, continued fractions, etc. It is remarkable that with little formal training in Mathematics, he was able to rediscover 100 years’ worth of mathematics and make exceptional discoveries in analysis and number theory.
Ramanujan was born on 22nd December 1887 in Erode. He was enrolled in the Town Higher Secondary School from 1897-1904, where he encountered formal mathematics for the first time. Ramanujan published his first paper in Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society in 1911 on Bernoulli numbers. The Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to visit Trinity College in Cambridge. Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge in 1914 and stayed there for nearly five years, working with both Hardy and Littlewood and that was the most productive period of his mathematical career.
In 1916, Ramanujan received his Bachelor of Science by Research (which would be called a PhD from 1920) for his work on Highly composite numbers. In 1917, Ramanujan was elected to the London Mathematical Society and in 1918, he was elected a Fellow of Royal Society of London ‘for his investigation in elliptic functions and the theory of numbers and a Fellow of Trinity College for a period of six years.
This is one of the very few realistic paintings of Ramanujan, located in the library of Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune (IISER, Pune), India.