National Mathematics Day is celebrated every year on the 22nd of December across India, to celebrate and remember the work of the late great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It was on this day the genius was born in Edore (Tamilnadu) in 1887 in a Brahmin Iyengar family.
8 years of National Mathematics Day
In the year 2012, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared, 22nd December as a National Mathematics Day, to mark the birth anniversary of the mathematician. Mathematics day is celebrated across the country, with organizing educational programs in schools.
A Man Who Knew Infinity
Ramanujan, who is also known as the ‘man who knew infinity’, did not receive any formal education in Mathematics but made important contributions to the field of mathematics. Ramanujan has had an interest in mathematics since his childhood. Ramanujan went to a local school in Erode (Tamilnadu) and was recognized as a child prodigy at the age of 11. When he was 13 years old he mastered trigonometry. His interest grew by a book, which was ‘A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics‘ by George Shoobridge Carr. He found the book when he was 15 years old.
The Journey of Ramanujan
Ramanujan graduated from Town Higher Secondary School in 1904 and was awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school’s headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. He even got a scholarship to study at Government’s Arts College Kumbakonam. However, not interested in any other subject, he failed to score minimum passing marks and lost his scholarship.
Ramanujan joined Trinity College a few months before the outbreak of World War I. In 1916, he was awarded the Bachelor of Science degree; the next year he was elected to the London Mathematical Society. In 1918, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his research on Elliptic Functions and the theory of numbers. The same year in October he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
However, he faced many health issues throughout his life, his health worsened in England, he was diagnosed with Tuberculosis and severe vitamin deficiency, he returned to India in 1919, and he breathed his last breath in 1920 at the age of 32.
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