Today is the 129th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, and though the Dev Patel-Jeremy Irons-starrer, The Man Who Knew Infinity, brought the Indian mathematician and his brilliance to a whole new audience, there's still a lot about the man that many people don't know.
So here are a few things you need to know about Ramanujam that will help you appreciate what a truly great man he was.
1) Ramanujan was an autodidact. An autodidact is person who is self-taught in the field of his choice and receives no guidance from someone with knowledge and experience of the field. A bit like teaching yourself to play guitar...only far more difficult.
2) Ramanujan actually has a journal named after him: the Ramanujan Journal. What's more it only features peer-reviewed papers about research into mathematical fields created by him!
3) Unlike many other famous scientists and mathematicians who were either atheists or agnostics, Ramanajuan was a deeply religious man, who believed that an equation only has meaning if it's expressed as a thought of god.
4) Ramanujan was awarded elected Fellow of the Royal Society when he was just 31, which is an incredibly young age. In 1918, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
5) Ramanujan had 'insights' into mathematics but rarely ever proofs, which is why his colleague and mentor at Cambridge, GH Hardy worked on proofs of his insights so that the mathematical community would take him seriously.
6) Ramanujan was only 32 when he died. At the time the cause of his death was said to be tuberculosis. In 1994, however, Dr DAB Young, who studied his medical records, determined that cause of death was in fact hepatic amoebiasis, which was treatable at the time Ramanujan was alive.
7) The Indian state of Tamil Nadu celebrates Ramanujam's birthday as State IT Day, while the country celebrates National Mathematics Day.
8) There is a reference made to Ramanujan in the superb Good Will Hunting in which Matt Damon's character (Will Hunting) is compared to the famous mathematician.
