Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dec. 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920), the brilliant twentieth century Indian mathematician, has been compared with all-time greats like Euler, Gauss and Jacobi, for his natural mathemagical genius. Despite his short life span, Ramanujan left behind an incredibly vast and formidable amount of original work, which has greatly influenced the development and growth of some of the best research work in mathematics of this century.

At the end of the twentieth century, eighty years after his premature death, it is no exaggeration to say that the interest in Ramanujan’s work is still alive and unabated. In the words of Dr. S. Chandrasekhar, the renowned Astrophysicist, as long as people do mathematics, the work of Ramanujan will continue to be appreciated. His name continues to appear even today in the titles or abstracts of papers in research publications in international journals of repute. The research work itself being motivated by his conjectures or the 3254 results stated by him in his note books without proof. There are, in fact, three journals named after Ramanujan: The Hardy–Ramanujan Journal, edited by Profs. R. Balasubramanian and K.Ramachandra and published by Prof. K. Ramachandra of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, on behalf of the Hardy-Ramanujan Society; the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society, edited by Prof. V. Kumar Murty and published by the Ramanujan Mathematical Society, started in 1985 and The Ramanujan Journal, started in 1997 with a galaxy of 27 mathematicians and Prof. Krishnaswami Alladi as its Editor-in-Chief – An International Journal Devoted to the Areas of Mathematics Influenced by Ramanujan – and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. This is a tribute befitting the great.

At the end of 1999, the Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy’s Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work were reprinted by the American Mathematical Society, thanks to the efforts of Professor Bruce C. Berndt (University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign, USA), who has spent all his time, since 1975, on the study of the work of Ramanujan, especially on Ramanujan’s renowned Notebooks and has consequently authored a five Part publication entitled: Ramanujan’s Notebooks (Springer-Verlag, 1885, 1989,1991, 1995 and 1998).

The Presidency College, Madras, the crown jewel of the South Indian educational system at the beginning of this century, had a major role to play in the shaping of the meteoric rise to fame of Ramanujan. In this the International Year of Mathematics 2000, it is but fitting to name a Lecture Hall in the Presidency College as the Ramanujan Hall and unveil a portrait of his, if not commission a bust to be installed, on his birthday, December 22.

The following points are noteworthy in this context:

• Among those who were early to recognize the extraordinary mathematical talent in Ramanujan was Mr. V. Ramaswamy Iyer, a student of Presidency College and a founder of the Indian Mathematical Society in 1909. It seems, Mr. Ramaswamy Iyer contributed mathematical articles to the Educational times in England and the editors assuming he was a college professor, addressed him as a Professor and the same stuck to his name!
  
• Prof. P.V. Seshu Iyer, was a teacher at the Government College, Kumbakonam when Ramanujan was a student there for his F.A. degree and subsequently he became a Professor of Mathematics at the Presidency College, in 1910. When Ramanujan approached Prof. Seshu Iyer, in 1912, with some theorems on Prime Numbers, Ramanujan’s attention was drawn to G.H. Hardy’s Tract on Orders of Infinity. When Ramanujan felt that he had found a definite expression for the number of prime numbers less than a given number, which Hardy stated, in his book, was not known, Ramanujan rushed to share his joy of discovery with Prof. Seshu Iyer who then induced Ramanujan to write to G.H. Hardy, at the Trinity College, Cambridge, enabling Ramanujan to discover in Hardy his true friend, philosopher and guide. Prof. Seshu Iyer was a Charter Member of the Indian Mathematical Society and in later years, he was commissioned by Hardy to write a biographical essay on Ramanujan with Dewan Bahadur B. Ramachandra Rao, for inclusion
  in the Collected Papers of Ramanujan, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1927.
  
• Ramanujan met E.W. Middlemast, a professor of Mathematics at Presidency College and obtained from him a recommendation letter which he appended to his application for a clerkship at the Madras Port Trust. Middlemast described Ramanujan as a young man of quite exceptional capacity in mathematics.
  
• By April 12, 1912, Ramanujan learned the good news that the Syndicate of the University of Madras had granted him the first ever research Scholarship in Mathematics, even though he was a failed F.A. (lacking the necessary qualification for a research scholarship). Prof. E.H. Neville wrote: he (Ramanujan) entered the Presidency College in Madras to practice as a virtue that single-minded devotion to mathematics which had been a vice in Kumbakonam nine years earlier. Prof. Neville had come as a visiting Professor to the University of Madras from Cambridge University to deliver a course of 21 lectures on differential geometry. Ramanujan met Prof. Neville for the first time in the Senate House, after one of his lectures, at the end of 1913.
  
• Prof. Richard Littlehailes an Oxford educated professor of mathematics at Presidency College was a later day champion of Ramanujan’s (though he was the one who raised technical objections for the award of a research scholarship to Ramanujan at the Syndicate meeting on April 7, 1913).
  
• It is said that Ramanujan who disliked the necessity to wear western clothes, walked into the faculty common room of the Presidency College with a big suitcase, to show what he was equipping himself with to the Professors there, a day before his departure to England.
  
• In late Dec. 1916, the Indian Mathematical Society (IMS) held its first conference at the Presidency College in Madras. Lord Pentland who inaugurated the Proceedings, said in his address: At the present time, a young Indian student, Mr. S. Ramanujan, is studying at Cambridge whose career we in Southern India are watching with keen interest and high anticipation. You know the story of the discovery of his unusual talent and all here will be glad to hear how entirely he is justifying the efforts which were made to give it full scope.
  
• When Ramanujan was conferred the Fellowship of the Royal Society in February 1918, Madras rolled out the red carpet for him in absentia, in the form of a meeting to honour him at Presidency College.
  
• The Presidency College was the venue of the second IMS, a couple of months before Ramanujan returned (in March 1919) to India and Ramanujan’s brilliant career and his election to the Fellowships of the Royal Society and the Trinity College Fellowship were on every speaker’s lips.

It should be possible with some effort to piece together some more facts about the meetings conducted at the Presidency College in connection with Ramanujan.