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American Mathematical Society (AMS) is publishing “Srinivasa Ramanujan: Going Strong at 125″, a collection of articles by top experts on the subject of impact on modern mathematics left by Ramanujan’s legacy, in its upcoming issue of the monthly journal ‘Notices of The AMS‘, to mark the occasion of 125th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the mathematical genius, born to a poor family in Tamil Nadu a state in southern India, on 22 December 1887.
Srinivasa Ramanujan is regarded as one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of all time. Ramanujan had an intimate familiarity with numbers that seems to have stemmed from his awe-inspiring ability to calculate with them. This ability gave him a profound understanding of numbers and their relationships.
The famous story about the “taxicab number” exemplifies this familiarity. At the invitation of the mathematician G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan visited Cambridge, England, in 1914 and lived there for several years. Once when Hardy traveled by taxicab to pay a visit to Ramanujan, he remarked that the cab had had a very dull number, 1729. “No”, Hardy recalled Ramanujan as saying, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
Ramanujan lived only for 32 years and died in 1920, cutting short his contribution to the field of mathematics. However, he left behind several notebooks in which he recorded his findings, and these have been a wellspring of mathematical activity. Several world-class mathematicians have devoted much of their careers to understanding the material in the notebooks. As a result, Ramanujan’s impact in mathematics has continued to grow over the years.
The collection of articles will appear in two installments in Notices of the AMS. The first in the December 2012 issue of the Notices (posted online on November 13, 2012 : “Srinivasa Ramanujan: Going Strong at 125″ Part I ), and the second in the January 2013 issue (to be posted online on December 6, 2012).