Binary Operation

Functions and relations
SRINIVASA AIYANGAR RAMANUJAN
Srinivasa Ramanujan Like Abel, Ramanujan was a self-taught prodigy who lived in a
country distant from his mathematical peers, and suffered from poverty: childhood dysentery
and vitamin deficiencies and that probably led to his early death.
Yet he produced 4000 theorems or conjectures in number theory, algebra, and
combinatorics. He might have been almost unknown today but hard it not been G H Hardy .
Ramanujan was born in Madras, India. Ramanujan did well in all his school subjects and
showed himself an able all round scholar at school. It was in School that Ramanujan came
across mathematics Carr's book elementary results in pure mathematics. This book, with its
very concise style, allowed Ramanujan to teach himself mathematics, the book contained
theorems, formulae and short proofs. It also contained an index to papers on pure
mathematics which had been published in the European Journals of Learned Societies. The
book, published in 1856, was of course well out of date by the time Ramanujan used it.
Ramanujan, on the strength of his good school work, was given a scholarship to the
Government College in Kumbakonam, which he entered in 1904. However the following year
his scholarship was not renewed because Ramanujan devoted more and more of his time to
mathematics and neglected other subjects. He continued his mathematical work, however,
and at this time he worked on hyper geometric series and investigated relations between
integrals and series. In 1906 he entered Pachaiyappa's College. His aim was to pass the
First Arts examination which would allow him to be admitted to the University of Madras. He
passed in mathematics but failed subjects and therefore failed the examination. This meant
that he could not enter the University of Madras. In the following years he worked on
mathematics developing his own ideas without any help and without any real idea of the then
current research topics other than that provided by Carr's book.
Maths Page 94
After publication of a brilliant research paper on Bernoulli numbers in 1911 in the Journal of
the Indian Mathematical Society, he gained recognition for his work. Despite his lack of a
university education, he was becoming well known in the Madras area as a mathematical
genius. On the strength of a recommendation, Ramanujan was appointed to the post of clerk.
A professor of civil engineering at the Madras Engineering College, C L T Griffith was also
interested in Ramanujan's abilities and, having been educated at University College London,
knew the professor of mathematics there, namely M J M Hill. He wrote to Hill sending some
of Ramanujan's work and a copy of his paper on Bernoulli numbers. Hill replied in a fairly
encouraging way but showed that he had failed to understand Ramanujan's results on
divergent series. His recommendation to Ramanujan that he read Bromwich's Theory of
infinite series did not please Ramanujan much. Ramanujan wrote to E W Hobson and H F
Baker trying to interest them in his results but neither replied. In January 1913 Ramanujan
wrote to G H Hardy having seen a copy of his 1910 book Orders of infinity. In Ramanujan's
letter to Hardy. Hardy, together with Littlewood, studied the long list of unproved theorems
which Ramanujan enclosed with his letter. On 8 February he replied to Ramanujan , Hardy
brought Ramanujan to Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin an extraordinary collaboration.
Right from the start Ramanujan's collaboration with Hardy led to important results. On 16
March 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research.
He had been allowed to enrol in June 1914 despite not having the proper qualifications. On
18 February 1918 Ramanujan was elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
and then three days later, the greatest honour that he would receive; his name appeared on
the list for election as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. He had been proposed by an
impressive list of mathematicians, namely Hardy, MacMahon, Grace, Larmor, Bromwich,
Hobson, Baker, Littlewood, Nicholson, Young, Whittaker, Forsyth and Whitehead. His
election as a fellow of the Royal Society was confirmed on 2 May 1918, and then on 10
October 1918 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, the fellowship to run for
six years.
In a letter from his deathbed, Ramanujan introduced his mysterious "mock theta functions",
gave examples, and developed their properties. Much later these forms began to appear in
disparate areas: combinatorics, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, and even knot theory
and the theory of black holes. It was only recently, more than 80 years after Ramanujan's
letter, that his conjectures about these functions were proven; solutions mathematicians
had sought unsuccessfully were found among his examples. Many of Ramanujan's
results are so inspirational that there is a periodical dedicated to them. The theories of strings
and crystals have benefited from Ramanujan's work. (Today some professors achieve fame
just by finding a new proof for one of Ramanujan's many results.) Unlike Abel, who insisted
on rigorous proofs, Ramanujan often omitted proofs. Ramanujan may have had unrecorded
proofs, poverty leading him to use chalk and erasable slate rather than paper.) Unlike Abel,
much of whose work depended on the complex numbers, most of Ramanujan's work focused
on real numbers. Despite these limitations, Ramanujan is considered one of the greatest
geniuses ever. Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February. However his health was very poor
and, despite medical treatment, he died there the following year.
Maths Page 95
CHAPTER 4
FUNCTIONS AND RELATIONS
WHY DO WE STUDY FUNCTIONS AND RELATIONS
In the real world, it's very common that one quantity depends on another
quantity, in everyday life; many quantities depend on one or more other
changing quantities. For example:
(a) Human growth depends on food.
(b) Speed of a car depends on distance travelled and time taken.
(c) the amount of concrete you need to order when constructing a building will
depend on the height of the building.
This chapter is about functions (this is how we express relationships between

quantities) and their graphs.
The graph of a function is really useful if we are trying to model a real-world

problem.
("Modeling" is the process of finding the relationships between quantities.)
Sometimes we may not know an expression for a function but we do

know some values (maybe from an experiment). The graph of a function
can give us a good idea of what function may be applied to the situation
to solve the problem.
Make sure you write notes in classroom, because they are

really helpful when revision
Maths Page 96

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Functions and relations

SRINIVASA AIYANGAR RAMANUJAN

FUNCTIONS AND RELATIONS

WHY DO WE STUDY FUNCTIONS AND RELATIONS

(a) Human growth depends on food.

(b) Speed of a car depends on distance travelled and time taken.

This chapter is about functions (this is how we express relationships between

The graph of a function is really useful if we are trying to model a real-world

("Modeling" is the process of finding the relationships between quantities.)

Sometimes we may not know an expression for a function but we do

Make sure you write notes in classroom, because they are

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