Srinivasa Ramanujan, the brilliant twentieth century Indian mathematician, has been compared with all-time greats like Euler, Gauss and Jacobi, for his natural mathematical genius. It may be impossible to define who a mathematical genius is, or, genius for that matter. But that does not prevent us from recognizing the work of a genius, the rarest of the rare - like the Himalayan peaks or the Niagara falls - which stands out in any field of human activity. 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. In this chapter we give a brief account of his life.

Early years

Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, at Erode, to Komalathammal and K. Srinivasa Iyengar, who was an accountant to a cloth merchant in Kumbakonam on a modest salary. He was the first of three sons. He was sent to Kangeyam Primary School in Kumbakonam at the age of seven. He stood first in the Tanjore District Primary Examinations held in November, and this entitled him to a half-fee concession in the Town High School at Kumbakonam, where he studied from 1898 to 1903. He passed the Matriculation Examination of the University of Madras (1904).

During his school days, he impressed his classmates, senior students and teachers with his extraordinary intuition and astounding proficiency in several branches of mathematics -- viz. arithmetic, algebra, geometry, number theory and trigonometry. In later years a friend of his recounted the following incident [1]: In an arithmetic class on division, the teacher said that if three bananas were given to three boys, each boy would get a banana. The teacher generalized this idea. Ramanujan is said to have asked:

``if and , what are and ?'',