Relevance of Srinivasa Ramanujan at the Dawn of the New Millennium

Abstract

The work of Ramanujan will be appreciated, as long as people do mathematics, opined the Astrophysicist Nobel Laureate Dr. S. Chandrasekhar, at the time of the birth centenary of Ramanujan. Prof. E.H. Neville began a broadcast in Hindustani, in 1941, as follows: Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician so great that his name transcends jealousies, the one superlatively great mathematician whom India has produced in the last thousand years. Undoubtedly, Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dec. 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920) is one of the greatest Mathematicians of the twentieth century. For his mathematical abilities and natural genius he has been compared, by his contemporaries, Professors G.H. Hardy and J.E. Littlewood, with all-time great mathematicians, Leonhard Euler, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Karl Gustav Jacobi. Marc Kac said: An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians … the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. Prof. Bruce C. Berndt who has methodically and thoroughly edited every one of the 3254 entries of Ramanujan in his three Notebooks — in Ramanujan’s Notebooks, Parts I to V, published by Springer-Verlag (1985–1997) — states that though there are a few scattered errors in these notebooks, Ramanujan’s accuracy is amazing and mystery … still surrounds some of his work.