Page 24 - Ramanujan Yatra

Ramanujan’s Note Books: The Treasure of Mathematics
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Prof. Dr. V. Sukumaran
Our nation is gearing up to celebrate the death centenary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Genius of Mathematics. On 26th April 1920, when he was only 32 years old, Ramanujan left the world, leaving the mankind to decipher the scribbles on his three notebooks and 37 articles
published in the leading international mathematical journals. The University Press of Cambridge has done the marvellous job of publishing his collected works in a huge volume in the year 1927 that enabled the younger generations to make use of his work as a stem cell.
The three note books (the fourth one seems to be missing), which are being considered a treasure for the modern-day mathematics, became the infinite source for the researchers of our time. Ramanujan’s work is getting more relevant today in areas as diverse as Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Physics, and of course, Mathematics. His formulas have offered glimpses of the theories that he probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate himself. His thoughts and work on mock theta functions have wider applications in today’s Physics including the one in the theory of Black Hole. Nobody even knew that Black Holes were something to study when Ramanujan was alive. But he had already developed some of the first formulas that would be used to explain their properties. What is astonishing is that Ramanujan has done this for us several hundred times. More than 4000 claims that he had laid in his note books for the future generations are getting established or deciphered as a novel concept day after day
The discovery made by Ramanujan provides solutions not only for numerical
Ramanujan
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