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Ramanujan: Carl Friedrich Gauss

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Tamil Nadu, India. He showed early aptitude in mathematics even as a young child. He struggled in formal schooling and moved frequently between family homes as a child. He was largely self-taught in mathematics.

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Neeraj Raikwar
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61 views3 pages

Ramanujan: Carl Friedrich Gauss

Ramanujan was born in 1887 in Tamil Nadu, India. He showed early aptitude in mathematics even as a young child. He struggled in formal schooling and moved frequently between family homes as a child. He was largely self-taught in mathematics.

Uploaded by

Neeraj Raikwar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Ramanujan

was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family


in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu), at the residence of his maternal
grandparents.[9] His father, K. Srinivasa Iyengar, worked as a clerk in a sari shop and
hailed from Thanjavur district.[10] His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and also
sang at a local temple.[11] They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani
Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam.[12] The family home is now a museum.
When Ramanujan was a year and a half old, his mother gave birth to a son,
Sadagopan, who died less than three months later. In December 1889, Ramanujan
contracted smallpox, but unlike the thousands in the Thanjavur district who died of the
disease that year, he recovered. [13] He moved with his mother to her parents' house
in Kanchipuram, near Madras (now Chennai). His mother gave birth to two more
children, in 1891 and 1894, but both died in infancy.
On 1 October 1892, Ramanujan was enrolled at the local school. [14] After his maternal
grandfather lost his job as a court official in Kanchipuram, [15] Ramanujan and his mother
moved back to Kumbakonam and he was enrolled in the Kangayan Primary School.
[16]
When his paternal grandfather died, he was sent back to his maternal grandparents,
then living in Madras. He did not like school in Madras, and tried to avoid attending. His
family enlisted a local constable to make sure the boy attended school. Within six
months, Ramanujan was back in Kumbakonam.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Brunswick (Braunschweig), in the Duchy
of Brunswick-Wolfenbttel (now part of Lower Saxony, Germany), as the son of poor working-class
parents.[3] His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that
he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension, which itself occurs
39 days after Easter. Gauss later solved this puzzle about his birthdate in the context of finding the
date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years. [4] He was
christened and confirmed in a church near the school he attended as a child. [5]
Gauss was a child prodigy. A contested story relates that, when he was eight, he figured out how
to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100.[6][7] There are many other anecdotes about his precocity
while a toddler, and he made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a
teenager. He completed Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, his magnum opus, in 1798 at the age of 21,
though it was not published until 1801. This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory
as a discipline and has shaped the field to the present day.
Gauss's intellectual abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick,[2] who sent him to the
Collegium Carolinum (now Braunschweig University of Technology), which he attended from 1792 to
1795, and to the University of Gttingen from 1795 to 1798. While at university, Gauss independently
rediscovered several important theorems.[8] His breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he showed that
a regular polygon can be constructed by compass and straightedge if and only if the number of sides
is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2. This was a major discovery in an important
field of mathematics; construction problems had occupied mathematicians since the days of
the Ancient Greeks, and the discovery ultimately led Gauss to choose mathematics instead
of philology as a career. Gauss was so pleased by this result that he requested that a
regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone. The stonemason declined, stating that the
difficult construction would essentially look like a circle. [9]
The year 1796 was most productive for both Gauss and number theory. He discovered a
construction of the heptadecagon on 30 March.[10] He further advanced modular arithmetic, greatly

simplifying manipulations in number theory. On 8 April he became the first to prove the quadratic
reciprocity law. This remarkably general law allows mathematicians to determine the solvability of
any quadratic equation in modular arithmetic. The prime number theorem, conjectured on 31 May,
gives a good understanding of how the prime numbers are distributed among the integers.

Aryabhata (Sanskrit: ; IAST: ryabhat a) or Aryabhata I[2][3] (476550 CE)[4][5] was the first of

the major mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian
astronomy. His works include the ryabhatya
(499 CE, when he was 23 years old)[6] and the Aryasiddhanta. While there is a tendency to misspell his name as "Aryabhatta" by analogy with other
names having the "bhatta" suffix, his name is properly spelled Aryabhata: every astronomical text
spells his name thus,[7] including Brahmagupta's references to him "in more than a hundred places by
name".[8] Furthermore, in most instances "Aryabhatta" would not fit the metre either.[7

Time and place of birth


Aryabhata mentions in the Aryabhatiya that it was composed 3,600 years into the Kali Yuga, when
he was 23 years old. This corresponds to 499 CE, and implies that he was born in 476. [5] Aryabhata
called himself a native of Kusumapura or Pataliputra (present day Patna).[1]
Other hypothesis
Bhskara I describes Aryabhata as makya, "one belonging to the Amaka country." During the
Buddha's time, a branch of the Amaka people settled in the region between
the Narmada and Godavari rivers in central India.[7][9]
It has been claimed that the amaka (Sanskrit for "stone") where Aryabhata originated may be the
present day Kodungallur which was the historical capital city of Thiruvanchikkulam of ancient Kerala.
[10]
This is based on the belief that Kot uallr was earlier known as Kot um-Kal-l-r ("city of hard
stones"); however, old records show that the city was actually Kot um-kol-r ("city of strict
governance"). Similarly, the fact that several commentaries on the Aryabhatiya have come from
Kerala has been used to suggest that it was Aryabhata's main place of life and activity; however,
many commentaries have come from outside Kerala, and the Aryasiddhanta was completely
unknown in Kerala.[7]K. Chandra Hari has argued for the Kerala hypothesis on the basis of
astronomical evidence.[11]
Aryabhata mentions "Lanka" on several occasions in the Aryabhatiya, but his "Lanka" is an
abstraction, standing for a point on the equator at the same longitude as his Ujjayini.[12]

Place value system and zero


The place-value system, first seen in the 3rd-century Bakhshali Manuscript, was clearly in place in
his work. While he did not use a symbol for zero, the French mathematician Georges Ifrah argues
that knowledge of zero was implicit in Aryabhata's place-value system as a place holder for the
powers of ten with null coefficients.[15]

Approximation of
Aryabhata worked on the approximation for pi (), and may have come to the conclusion that
is irrational. In the second part of the Aryabhatiyam (ganitapda 10), he writes:
caturadhikam atamas tagun
sahasrn m
am dvs as tistath

ayutadvayavis kambhasysanno vrttaparin

hah .
"Add four to 100, multiply by eight, and then add 62,000. By this rule the circumference of a circle
with a diameter of 20,000 can be approached."

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