Mike Hirschhorn visits India for 125th anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan's birth

Dr Mike Hirschhorn recently returned from India, where he attended conferences in Mysore, Kumbakonam and Delhi, all marking the 125^th anniversary of the birth of 20th century Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

It is almost to the day, one hundred years ago, since Ramanujan wrote his first letter to G. H. Hardy. This famous letter led to Ramanujan spending five years with Hardy in Cambridge, his becoming an FRS and a Fellow of Trinity College, and making an enormous contribution to mathematics. One year after leaving Cambridge, Ramanujan died (of hepatic amoebiasis, eminently curable at the time if diagnosed).

Ramanujan's legacy is ongoing, with ramifications in Physics and Mathematics.

As Dr Hirschhorn said at an earlier conference in Gainesville, Florida, to an audience of about fifty Ramanujan afficianados, “Where would you be if Ramanujan had not written this letter?”

Kumbakonam, in Tamil Nadu, the so-called “Cambridge of South India”, is the town where Ramanujan grew up. The (new) University there, SASTRA, owns Ramanujan's childhood home, which is now a National Memorial. At the SASTRA conference “The Legacy of Ramanujan”, Honorary Doctorates were awarded to the “Ramanujan Trinity”: Dick Askey, George E. Andrews and Bruce Berndt.

SASTRA University awards the annual SASTRA Ramanujan Prize ($10,000) to the most deserving mathematician under 32 years of age (Ramanujan was 32 when he died). This year, exceptionally, the SASTRA Prize was awarded at the Delhi conference “The Legacy of Ramanujan''. It was awarded to Zhiwei Yun of Stanford.

Dr Hirschhorn took the opportunity to attend all three conferences as he has been reading Ramanujan's work for 50 years, and writing on it for 40. He has written around 100 papers on Ramanujan's work and closely related subjects. 

(Image: Srinivasa Ramanujan)