Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician (Great Thinkers of India)

This is the moving story of the life of Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematical genius who was born in 1887. The son of a clerk in a cloth merchant's shop, at the age of 13, Ramanujan had mastered Loney's Trigonometry and calculated the length of the Earth's equator. Before he was 23 and in spite of poverty and unemployment, Ramanujan had filled a whole notebook with hundreds of mathematical theorems and results. In Cambridge, he was acknowledged to be the most remarkable mathematician of the times and was elected a Fellow of the Trinity College of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society at the early age of 30. The book contains the reminiscences of several surviving contemporaries of Ramanujan. It highlights his penetrating intuition and childlike simplicity. He was a 'Seer' in mathematics, and though agnostic in arguments, he was ever conscious of the immanence of God.