Page 36 - Ramanujan Yatra
P. 36
Srinivasa Ramanujan Commemorating his Death Centenary
Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay
uring his last days, when he was only 32 years old, fragile with irrecoverably ill health but still working passionately with full vigour on what will later come to be known as the Mock Theta Function, one of his
seminal contributions to the world of mathematics, Ramanujan once told his wife Janaki that his name “will live for one hundred years”. How amazingly right he was! On the eve of his Death Centenary (26th April, 2020), his name appears in the titles of over two thousand research articles in Mathematics, as a quick search in MathSciNet reveals. This numeral arguably may not be proportional to his greatness, but this may be regarded as some measure to judge the relevance of Ramanujan’s beautiful mathematics even in this 21st century. Prof. Ken Ono, a noted Ramanujan scholar from Emory University points out that “The legend of Ramanujan has continued to grow with the ever-increasing importance of his mathematics... Clearly, Ramanujan was a great anticipator. His work provided examples of deeper structures, and suggested important questions which are now inescapable in the panorama of modern number theory.... his untimely death and the enigmatic nature of his writings resulted in a great mystery. We will never know how he came up with the mock theta functions. We certainly cannot pretend to know what he fully intended to do with them. However, it is clear that he understood that the mock theta functions would go on to play
important roles in number theory.”
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Ramanujan
YATRA
Biographies of mathematicians, barring few exceptions, are hardly known to be popular; but Robert Kanigel has trodden that seemingly impossible path
