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Here is some information about Ramanujan’s life and work that students can use in their Mathematics Day Quiz, speech and essay:
1. Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 at Erode, Tamil Nadu in a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family.
2. Ramanujan studied at the Government College in Kumbakonam in 1903. In college, he failed exams due to his negligence for non-mathematical subjects.
3. In 1912, Ramanujan started working as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust. It is in this place his genius was recognized by a colleague who was also a mathematician. The colleague referred Ramanujan to Professor GH Hardy of Trinity College, Cambridge University.
4. Ramanujan joined Trinity College a few months before World War I began. In 1916, he received a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree. He was elected to the London Mathematical Society in 1917.
5. Next year, he was elected a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society for his research on Elliptic Functions and theory of numbers.
6. In the same year, in October, he became the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College.
7. Ramanujan returned to India in 1919. A year later, he breathed his last at the age of 32.
8. The 2015 movie 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' was released based on Srinivasa Ramanujan’s biography. It describes the mathematician's life and journey towards establishing the famed mathematical theories.
9. Ramanujan’s mathematical genius was such that he discovered his own theorems and independently compiled 3900 results.
10. As mentioned in Ramanujan's biography 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' by Robert Knaigel, GH Hardy once went to visit Ramanujan at a hospital. Mr Hardy told him that he came in a taxi with the number '1729' which seemed to be an ordinary number. Ramanujan said that it was not. 1729, later termed the Hardy-Ramanujan Number, is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways, he said.
