Ramanujan Is Born in Erode

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin family in Erode, in what is now Tamil Nadu, India. He had almost no formal mathematical training, working out results in isolation from what he could find in library books, and by 1913 he was writing to Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy with pages of original theorems. Hardy, who at first suspected a hoax, recognized some of the formulae but found others 'seemed scarcely possible to believe,' and brought Ramanujan to England in 1914. Ramanujan kept to a strict vegetarian diet there, a religious practice Hardy noted directly, at a time and place that made it hard to eat well. He fell seriously ill in England and returned to India, where he died in 1920 at 32.