National Mathematics Day

India celebrates National Mathematics Day on December 22 every year.

The day marks the birth anniversary of famous mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

In the year 2012 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the date as National Mathematics Day to honor the great man.

From his childhood, he has had a huge passion for mathematics. So much so, that at the age of 12, he had mastered trigonometry and developed many theorems on his own with no assistance.

He was awarded a scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam, but he eventually lost it due to his abysmal performance in other subjects.

He ran away from home and enrolled himself at Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras.The fascinating scientific study of the anatomy, physiology, behaviour, habitats, and health of humans and animals has a big impact on the environment. It uses a range of techniques, such as electron microscopy, molecular genetics, and field ecology.

About - Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, the story of Ramanujan’s tryst with mathematics is one of the most engaging tales read, depicted, and performed through various works of art. Ramanujan studied at the Government College in Kumbakonam in 1903. In college, he failed exams due to his negligence for non-mathematical subjects. In 1912, Ramanujan started working as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust. It is in this place his genius was recognized by a colleague who was also a mathematician. The colleague referred Ramanujan to Professor GH Hardy of Trinity College, Cambridge University. Ramanujan joined Trinity College a few months before World War I began. In 1916, he received a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree. He was elected to the London Mathematical Society in 1917. Next year, he was elected a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society for his research on Elliptic Functions and the theory of numbers. In the same year, in October, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College. Ramanujan returned to India in 1919. A year later, he breathed his last at the age of 32. The 2015 movie 'The Man Who Knew Infinity was released based on Srinivasa Ramanujan’s biography. It describes the mathematician's life and journey towards establishing the famed mathematical theories. Ramanujan’s mathematical genius was such that he discovered his theorems and independently compiled 3900 results. As mentioned in Ramanujan's biography 'The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Knaigel, GH Hardy once went to visit Ramanujan at a hospital. Mr. Hardy told him that he came in a taxi with the number '1729' which seemed to be an ordinary number. Ramanujan said that it was not. 1729, later termed the Hardy-Ramanujan Number, is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways, he said.