A box of manuscripts and three notebooks. That's all
that's left of the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician who
lived his remarkable but short life around the beginning of the twentieth
century. Yet, that small stash of mathematical legacy still yields surprises.
Two mathematicians of Emory University, Ken Ono and Sarah Trebat-Leder, have
recently a made a fascinating discovery within its yellowed pages. It shows
that Ramanujan was further ahead of his time than anyone had expected, and provides
a beautiful link between several milestones in the history of mathematics. And
it all goes back to the innocuous-looking number 1729.
Ramanujan's story is as inspiring as it is tragic.
Born in 1887 in a small village around 400 km from Madras (now Chennai),
Ramanujan developed a passion for mathematics at a young age, but had to pursue
it mostly alone and in poverty. Until, in 1913, he decided to write a letter to
the famous Cambridge number theorist G.H. Hardy. Accustomed to this early form
of spam, Hardy might have been forgiven for dispatching the highly unorthodox
letter straight to the bin. But he didn't. Recognising the author's genius,
Hardy invited Ramanujan to Cambridge, where he arrived in 1914. Over the
following years, Ramanujan more than repaid Hardy's faith in his talent, but
suffered ill health due, in part, to the grizzly English climate and food.
Ramanujan returned to India in 1919, still feeble, and died the following year,
aged only 32. Hardy later described his collaboration with Ramanujan as
"the one romantic incident in my life".
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Source: https://plus.maths.org/content/ramanujan
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