naga naveen

Famous books: Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on the Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work by G. H. Hardy, Chelsea Publishing Co, New York, 1940. The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by R. Kanigel, Abacus Books, London, 1992. Ramanujan’s Notebooks (Part I&II) by B.C. Berndt Springer, New York, 1985-1989. Ramanujan:The Man and the Mathematician by S.R. Ranganathan, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1967. Srinivasa Ramanujan : A Mathematical Genius by K. Srinivasa Rao; East West Books (Madras) Pvt. Ltd. 1998. Srinivasa Ramanujan, Suresh Ram, National Book Trust India, 1989. Ganit Jagater Bismay Ramanujan by Satyabachi Sar, Gyan Bichitra Prakashani, Agartala, 2000. A well-written book in Bengali.

Ramanujan’s brief life and death are symbolic of conditions in India. Of our millions how few get any education at all; how many live on the verge of starvation. Jawaharlal Nehru in his Discovery of India Sheer intuitive brilliance coupled to long, hard hours on his slate made up for most of his educational lapse. This ‘poor and solitary Hindu pitting his brains against the accumulated wisdom of Europe’ as Hardy called him, had rediscovered a century of mathematics and made new discoveries that would captivate mathematicians for next century. Robert Kanigel in The Man who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan I still say to myself when I am depressed and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms’. Godfrey Harold Hardy