14. Summary

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in Erode, Tamil Nadu, in a poor family. He was good at Maths from a very young age. He questioned his teacher as to how one has to divide zero by zero. The teacher gave the answer as infinity. This was one of the difficult concepts that most mathematicians had worked on to derive an answer. He grew up with a passion for Maths, but he failed in other subjects and therefore did not have a degree. He worked on scraps of paper to derive new ideas and equations. He later became a clerk in the Madras port. But his brilliance in Mathematics fetched him a research scholarship in Madras University, which later on led him to be selected as a research scholar in Cambridge. Although life in Britain was difficult, he went on to solve and create some of the best hypotheses in Mathematics. He was later affected by tuberculosis, but he continued to work Maths, even in his deathbed.