National Mathematics Day: Know about Srinivasa Ramanujan, 'The man who knew infinity'

NEW DELHI: National Mathematics Day is celebrated in India on the birth anniversary of legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, December 22 every year. To mark the 125th birth anniversary of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on February 26, 2012, at Madras University announced that 2012 would be celebrated as the National Mathematics Year.

Since then, India's National Mathematics Day is celebrated on December 22 every year with numerous educational events held at schools and universities throughout the country.

In 2017, the mathematics day's significance was enhanced by the opening of the Ramanujan Math Park in Kuppam, in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh.

Though Ramanujan had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems that were considered unsolvable.

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Ramanujan was deeply religious and credited his mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess Namagiri Thayar. He once said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."

In 1919, Ramanujan died at the age of 32 due to ill health—now believed to have been hepatic amoebiasis (a complication from episodes of dysentery many years previously). His "lost notebook", containing discoveries from the last year of his life, caused great excitement among mathematicians when it was rediscovered in 1976.

‘The man who knew infinity’, is a biographical film about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, enacted by British Indian actor Dev Patel in 2015.