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One day in 1913, the British mathematician Godfrey Hardy received a strange letter that began with: "I would like to introduce myself to you as follows: I am an employee of the Port Trust of Madras." I didn't finish my regular college courses, but I was blazing my own way. The mathematicians here said that the results I got were 'amazing'. If you think these theorems are valuable, please publish these results. " .

The registration place is the name of an Indian whom I have never met before-Ramanujin, and the last few pieces of paper of the letter are full of formulas.

Godfrey Hardy often received such letters, which were usually thrown into the wastebasket, but this time, for some reason, Hardy did not do so. He examined the letter carefully, dated January 16, 1913, from India, 8000 kilometers away. Curious, Hardy invited his colleague Ritter Wood, and the two pondered the letter several times. The numbers and symbols of the whole article are full of erudition, but they are not so familiar to read, neither make-up nor plagiarism. If it is written by the letter, this person should be a rare mathematical genius. After 3 hours of identification, they think that this person is very unusual, is a top-level mathematician!

The top mathematician is Srinivasser Ramanujin.

Sereni Vasser Ramanujin was born into a declining Brahmin family in southeastern India on December 22, 1887. My father is a junior clerk, and the whole family lives on my father's salary of 20 rupees a month.

When Ramanujin entered high school at the age of 10, Ramanujin received formal mathematics education, and mathematics was like a ray of sunshine in his heart. Ramanujin's extraordinary talent, extraordinary learning ability, curiosity and interest made Ramanujin miraculously climb rapidly in the field of mathematics.

When he was 11 years old, a college student tenant came to his home, and Ramanujin soon mastered all the mathematical knowledge of the tenant.

At the age of 13, he was familiar with the Handbook of Mathematics, the only math book on hand that he could not put down.

At the age of 15, he borrowed from a friend an introduction to Pure and Applied Mathematics by the British mathematician Carl, which contains 5000 equations in algebra, calculus, trigonometry and analytic geometry. unfortunately, no detailed proof and answer is given, which is exactly in line with Ramanujin's appetite. He treated each equation as a research problem and tried to prove it and popularize it. It took him five years to do the job, for which he left hundreds of pages of mathematical notes. During this period, he carried this precious book, often forgot hunger, but laid a solid foundation in mathematics.

In order to make a living as an adult, Ramanujin became a scribe in an accounting firm. In 1911, his first paper, on some Properties of Bernoulli quantity, was published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society, and began to communicate with his colleagues in the field of mathematics. Soon, his second paper was published. In this paper, he unexpectedly puts forward 14 formulas for calculating pi, one of which has the accuracy of the eighth decimal place.

In India at that time, few people could read Ramanujin's achievements, and some people advised him to venture into the outside world. He wrote to two English mathematicians, Hobson and Baker, but nothing was done. He plucked up the courage to try again and sent the letter to Hardy, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge in England. On February 8, 1913, Hardy replied to Ramanukin, inviting him to come to Cambridge University to cooperate with him.

Ramanujin left Madras on March 17, 1914 and arrived in England on April 14. With the help of Hardy, he successfully entered Cambridge University and became Hardy's graduate student and assistant. Two years later, he got his doctorate.

Ramanujin's graduation photo, the fourth person from the front row from the left is Ramanujin's extraordinary mathematical genius and insight. Ramanujin quickly made important achievements in the fields of stacking prime numbers, elliptic functions, hypergeometric functions, divergent series, and so on.

In only five years, he has published 28 papers in cooperation with Hardy. He independently discovered 3800 mathematical formulas and dozens of mysterious mathematical propositions. When others were amazed at how prolific he was, he often explained that it was the revelation brought to him by the goddess Namal in his dream that he woke up in the morning with inspiration for new formulas and propositions. The propositions he foresaw are either confirmed by him or by others in the future.

Ramanujin is astonishingly quick in thinking and skilled in computing. Once, when Ramanujin was ill, Hardy came to the hospital to see him and told him that the taxi license plate number 1729 was very unlucky, for fear of foreboding something ominous. Ramanujin replied with a smile, this number is very interesting, it happens to be the sum of the cube of 12 and the cube of 1, and the sum of the cube of 10 and 9, that is, 1729'13 '123' 103'93. Speaking of this, Hardy said, "it seems that every number is a good friend of Ramanujin."

On December 6, 1917, Ramanujin was elected a member of the Mathematical Society of London. In 1918, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, becoming the first person in Asia to have this honorary status. On October 13, 1918, he was elected fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University, when his mathematics career reached its zenith.

However, Ramanujin's health is getting worse and worse. He was a Brahmin, vegetarian, lonely and poor, coupled with the lack of vegetables and fruits during the war, and the cold, humid and foggy Cambridge weather made him extremely uncomfortable. In 1917, he found himself suffering from tuberculosis.

In 1919, tuberculosis forced Ramanujin to leave Britain and return to India, and he died the following year at the age of 33. His death made the mathematics circle sigh. Years later, it was mentioned that behind this legendary mathematical genius, he had left a "lost note"-a fascinating and esoteric mathematical legacy, but he did not know where, which attracted the attention of the mathematical community.

Two pages in Ramanujin's mathematical notes as early as Madras, Ramanujin wrote down what he wanted in his notebook, a habit that continued throughout his life. Before leaving India, there were several such notes, recording only what he could understand, both formulas and propositions, and some were written in the form of conjecture, but no proof or results were obtained.

Ramanujin could have proved these formulas, but he did not do it. One of the reasons was that paper in India was very expensive at that time. For Ramanujin, the salary was not enough to make ends meet, and it was impossible for him to buy paper. He often makes deductions on the slate, obtains the results, and then copies them on paper.

There is another reason why there is no proof, which is influenced by the mathematician Carl, who was studying Carl's book at that time, and the formulas and propositions in this book are often unproved and unanswered. In addition, Ramanujin did this purely out of personal interest and had no intention of publishing it.

For half a century, mathematicians have struggled to find Ramanujin's "lost notes". After Ramanujin's death, his wife gave the set of notes to Madras University. On August 30, 1923, the registrar Francis Dressberg sent Hardy most of the information left over by Ramanukin. Some speculate that it may include "lost notes". There is also speculation that Hardy may have handed over these materials to the British mathematician Watson between 1934 and 1947.

After Huasheng's death in 1965, Cambridge mathematician Huatek found some notebooks while examining Watson's belongings and handed them over to the Wayne Library at Trinity College, Cambridge University on December 26, 1968.

In this way, Ramanujin's "lost Notes" has been preserved after nearly half a century. Were it not for the arrival of mathematician George Andrews, they would always be sealed in the historical archives.

Andrews visited Trinity College in 1976 and stumbled upon this set of notes in the library archives, which caused a sensation in the field of mathematics. Bruce Bonart, an American mathematician who helped organize his notes, said: "this discovery caused a sensation in the field of mathematics, just as the discovery of Beethoven's 10th Symphony caused a sensation in the music world."

As Ramanujin's last effort, the note was compiled by Andrews and Bonat, and finally published five volumes in 1997 under the name "lost Notes."

One page of the note contains hundreds of chapters, more than 600 unproved formulas and hundreds of original written materials. Although it was written by Ramanujin when he was young, its mystery and hidden great value strongly attracted countless mathematicians. Delinie, a Belgian mathematician, proved a conjecture put forward by Ramanujin and won the Fields Prize, the highest prize in mathematics.

Ramanujin can be called a miracle in the history of mathematics. His work not only provides rich historical materials for the research of modern mathematics, but also has an inestimable influence on the development of modern mathematics. In his short life, he created more than 3000 formulas and equations, including many infinite series, including the following infinite series formula about π:

In addition to pure mathematics, Ramanujin's related mathematical theory has also been widely used.

Several of the theorems he discovered play an important role in different fields, including particle physics, statistical mechanics, computer science, cryptography and space technology. The mathematics he developed has attracted more attention in the application of modern complexity. The last achievement in his life, imitating theta function, developed the solitary wave theory, which can be used not only to study the deterioration and spread of cancer cells, but also to explain the formation of tsunamis. Some experts believe that this function can also be used to explain some of the mysteries of black holes in the universe. Surprisingly, when Ramanujin proposed this function, German physicist Schwarzschild had just come up with the solution of Einstein's equation, and people did not know what a black hole was at that time.

Hardy, as a teacher and friend of Ramanujin, said with emotion: "We are all learners of mathematics, and Ramanujin is the discoverer of mathematics, and he is the creator of mathematics." Hardy often said that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the "discovery of Ramanujin". Indeed, if Hardy had not taken the letter seriously, I am afraid Ramanujin would have been sealed in Madras forever like a piece of black gold.

When evaluating mathematical genius, Hardy designed a math genius rating scale. He scored 25 for himself, 30 for his friend mathematician Ritter Wood, and 80 for Hilbert, the greatest German mathematician of his generation. Ramanujin scored 100!

In memory of this great mathematician, in 1950, the University of Madras in India established the Institute of Advanced Mathematics named after Ramanujin, and a marble bust stood in front of him.

In the inscription of the stone statue, Ramanujin is called "the son of India" with Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Tagore. In 1962, on the 75th anniversary of Ramanujin's birth, India issued a set of stamps to commemorate him.

One of the stamps, the formula in the picture is one of Ramanujin's 14 formulas for π. In 1987, on the 100th anniversary of Ramanujin's birth, India made three films about his life. On December 26, 2011, India established 2012 as the "National year of Mathematics" and declared Ramanujin's birthday, December 22, as the "National Mathematics Day".

Wen Yuan: 365 days in the History of Science, slightly edited by Wei Fengwen Wu Yi Editor: Zhang Runxin this article comes from the official account of Wechat: Origin Reading (ID:tupydread), author: Wei Fengwen, Wu Yi, Editor: Zhang Runxin

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