Ramanujan was born into poverty to an Indian family of the Brahmin (highest) caste. Religion was very important to him and he spent much time in the local temple of his family deity as a child. His mother was a housewife who sang in the temple at Kumbakonam and was also very devout. He was deeply religious throughout his life and attributed his mathematical discoveries to the goddess Namagiri Thayar otherwise known as Namagiri Lakshmi.

His father was a clerk who earned very little. Ramanujan contracted smallpox as a child and almost died of it but his mother nursed him intensively and he came though. He and his mother moved to her parents’ house at around this time. Although his mother had other children, they all died in infancy. His mother taught him the religious rules of their Brahmin caste and he was a strict vegetarian.

Ramanujan did very well in primary school until he and his mother moved back to Madras.He wasn’t happy at the primary school there and played hooky until his family enlisted the aid of a local constable to ensure his attendance.

By the age of 11 he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge of a couple of college students lodging at his home. Someone gave him a textbook on advanced trigonometry which he mastered by the age of 13, coming up with his own mathematical theorems

In high school he was formally introduced to mathematics for the first time. The subject was his greatest pleasure and his playground and from childhood he spent all his time on it while his peers played games in the street.At 14 he was earning merit certificates and academic awards that continued throughout high school.

When he was sixteen, he discovered G S Carr’s book of five thousand mathematical theorems called A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics and studied its contents in detail. The following year, he independently investigated and developed the Euler-Mascheroni constant and the Bernouilli numbers. He did not know they’d already been discovered. His peers could not understand him and regarded him with awe.

Although he won a scholarship to go to college after high school, he lost it after the first year because his exclusive focus on maths led to poor results in his other subjects. No-one really understood him – and that is the curse of the blessed. If a person is so far in advance of his peers thathe is effectively peerless,no-oneunderstands or appreciateshis talent and heis mentally isolated in his own world with no support.

Ramanujan wasan autodidact and a mathematical genius butafter failing college could only manage to secure a poorly paid job as a lowly clerk at the Madras Port Trust. His failure in college was held against him in the job market.He lived in abject poverty, constantly on the brink of starvation, despite his rare talent.

His mother selected a girl for him to marry in 1909. After his marriage he developed a hydrocele testis which could be cured by straightforward surgery but he had no money to pay for. Eventually a doctor did the operation for free. He was sick again in 1910 – sosick that he gave his notebooks to his friend R. RadakrishnaIyer, asking him to give them to the mathematics professor at Pachaiyappas College or to professor Edward Ross of Madras Christian College if he did not recover.

He spent all his spare time doing mathematics and tried to bring his efforts to the notice of a number of Indian maths luminaries, one of whom was the secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society, R. R Rao. The latter was impressed but questioned whether Ramanujan’s work was his own. Eventually he became convinced of Ramanujan’s authenticity. Another notable Bombay mathematician could not understand his work but did not believe he was a fraud.

Rao, N. Iyer and E. W.Middlemast, who thought highly of him, tried to present Ramanujan’s work to British mathematician M J M Hill of University College London with little success. Hill said Ramanujan’s work was full of holes and that he lacked the educational background and foundation to be accepted by mathematicians. Hill did give some serious professional advice on Ramanujan’s work however.

Ramanujan wasn’t giving up though and wrote to Professors H. F Baker and E.W Hobson at Cambridge University attaching some of his work. They too brushed him off, returning his correspondence without comment. Eventually,on 16 January 1913 Ramanujan wrote to G H Hardy, a brilliant mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge.

G H Hardy was so impressed that he invited Ramanujan to come to England to further his studies. This was problematic for Ramanujan because his religion forbade overseas travel, he had no money, no resources and no cultural or familial support system in England. He initially refused the invitation and his parents also opposed the trip. These things posed severe obstacles for him which had to be overcome. He had to negotiate that cardinal Grand cross again of earth, air, fire and water.

Hardy persevered enlisting the aid of his colleague in Madras E H Neville to mentor Ramanujan and assist him to come to England. Ramanujan’s mother had a vivid dream in which the family goddess told her to stop standing between Ramanujan and his life’s purpose. Ramanujan was persuaded to go to England.

According to Wikipedia –

“Ramanujan spent nearly five years in Cambridge collaborating with Hardy and Littlewood, and published part of his findings there. Hardy and Ramanujan had highly contrasting personalities. Their collaboration was a clash of different cultures, beliefs, and working styles. In the previous few decades, the foundations of mathematics had come into question and the need for mathematically rigorous proofs recognised. Hardy was an atheist and an apostle of proof and mathematical rigour, whereas Ramanujan was a deeply religious man who relied very strongly on his intuition and insights. Hardy tried his best to fill the gaps in Ramanujan’s education and to mentor him in the need for formal proofs to support his results, without hindering his inspiration—a conflict that neither found easy.”

At one point Ramanujan became so ill in England he couldn’t work for months and tried to commit suicide.  He was plagued with poor health throughout his life. Yet he earned not only his degree from Cambridge but also membership of the London Mathematical Society, fellowship of the Royal Society and fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge. These were rare achievements even for the privileged members of English society, let alone a poor man from India with no college education.

He returned to India in 1919 where he died at the young age of 32. Hardy wrote in Ramanujan’s obituary that –

“His insight into formulae was quite amazing, and altogether beyond anything I have met with in any European mathematician. It is perhaps useless to speculate as to his history had he been introduced to modern ideas and methods at sixteen instead of at twenty-six. It is not extravagant to suppose that he might have become the greatest mathematician of his time. What he actually did is wonderful enough… when the researches which his work has suggested have been completed, it will probably seem a good deal more wonderful than it does to-day.”

Hardy was right. Ramanujan’s workcontinues to inform science and mathematics more than one hundred years since his death. Even now,experts are stilldiscovering andrealising the true genius of the man who was Ramanujan[i], the great mathematician who successfully negotiated his squares.

[i]https://plus.maths.org/content/ramanujan