to Ramanujan who was in the fourth year at school. Ramanujan's immediate reply² -- to this question which was expected to be tackled by only a sixth year student -- that and won for him a friend who in later years took him to the collector of Nellore. The senior mathematics teacher of the school (Ganapathy Subbier) had such confidence in Ramanujan's ability that year after year he entrusted Ramanujan with the task of preparing a conflict free time-table [3] for the school. Ramanujan won prizes for his outstanding performances in mathematics and mastered Loney's Trigonometry, Part II, in his fourth year at school. He won many prizes [4] in his second, fourth and sixth years at High School.

To augment the family income, Ramanujan's mother took in a couple of students from Tirunelveli and Tiruchirapalli as boarders. Noticing Ramanujan's precocity in mathematics these undergraduate students are purported to have given him an elementary introduction to all branches of mathematics. In 1903, through these friends from the Kumbakonam
[4]Government College, Ramanujan obtained G.S. Carr's: A Synopsis of Elementary Results, a book on Pure Mathematics, which contained propositions, formulae and methods of analysis with abridged demonstrations published in 1886. Prof. G.H. Hardy [IV] says about George Shoobridge Carr, formerly Scholar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge:

Carr himself was a private coach in London, who came to Cambridge as an undergraduate when he was nearly forty, and was 12th Senior Optime in the Mathematics Tripos of 1880 (the same year in which he published the first volume of his book). He is now completely forgotten, even in his own College, except in so far as Ramanujan has kept his name alive. ... Carr's book covers roughly the subjects of Schedule A of the present Tripos³ (as these subjects were understood in Cambridge in 1880), and is effectively a ``synopsis'' it professes to be. It contains the enunciations of 6165 theorems, systematically and quite scientifically arranged, with proofs which are often little more than cross-references and are decidedly the least interesting part of the book. All this is exaggerated in Ramanujan's famous notebooks⁴ (which contain no proofs at all), and any student of the notebooks can see that Ramanujan's ideal of presentation has been copied from Carr's.
Prof. Richard Askey has pointed out⁵ the fact that in Carr's `Synopsis', while formulae in each chapter are numbered continuously, the numbering for each chapter starts with 100, 200, etc., discontinuously. Numbers are skipped in intermediate places, as well as in certain chapters, and it is conjectured that this was done perhaps with a view to the possibility of adding new material in approximately the right places in future editions of the book. In all about 1300 numbers are skipped and so, though the last entry bears the number 6165, referred to by Hardy, the total number of formulae is only about 4865. These formulae, presented by Carr without proofs, are in algebra, trigonometry, analytical geometry and calculus. This book is similar to the later day compilations like that of, say, Table of Integrals, Series, and Products, by I.S. Gradshteyn and I.M. Ryzhik (5th edition, Academic Press, New York, 1994). Prof. P.V. Seshu Aiyar and Mr. R. Ramachandra Rao, in their biographies of Ramanujan (see [III]) state that: