This is the moving story of the life of Ramanujan the great Indian mathematical genius who appeared suddenly as a meteor in 1887, rushed through a short span of thirty-two years, consumed himself and disappeared with equal suddenness. At the age of thirteen, he had mastered Loney's Trigonometry and even calculated the length of the equator of the earth.
Son of a clerk in a cloth merchant's shop in Kumbakonam, before he was 23, had filled a whole notebook with hundreds of mathematical theorems and results, in spite of poverty, unemployment and absence of anyone who could understand his work Many of the theorems were new to the mathematical world and some have some have not yet been proved.
The book unfolds in quick succession, the chief events of his life beginning with his search in 1911 for a clerical post, always carrying his notebook under his arm, to his sailing to England in 1914 and his return home in 1919.
In Cambridge he was soon acknowledged to be the most remarkable mathematician of our times and ws elected a Fellow of the Trinity College of Cambridge and a Fellow of the royal Society at the early age of thirty.
The book contains the reminiscences of several surviving contemporaries of Ramanujan. It highlights his penetrating intuition and childlike simplicity. He was a 'See' in mathematics. Though agnostic in arguments, he was ever conscious of the immanence of god.
Dr. S. R. Rangangthan (1892to1972)
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan is World -renowned in the field of Library and information science. There is hardly any aspect of library science that he has ot touched and made significant contributions to it. Hes Five Laws of Library Science laid the foundatins of library and information servicce; and his Prolegomena to Library Classification to Knowledge oranization (Subject structuring, classification and indexing); Dr. Ranganathan received many honours ---the National Research Professorship in Library Science in March 1965 conferred by the Goverment of India.: D. Litt ( Honoris causa) by the Delhi U*niversity in 1948 Doctorate in Library Scince by the University of Pittsburgh in 1964, Padma Shri in 1956; and the Margaret Mann award in 1971 by the American Library Association for his contribution to cataloguing theory and pratice. Born in August 1892, Dr. Ranganathan earned his M A in Mathematics from the Madras. He started as a lecturer in mathematics and Physics in some of the constituent colleges of the Madras University. Chance events led him to accept the Madras University Librarian's post in 1924. After a year's study at the school of Librarianship and Archives in London, he returned to the Madras University Library and for the next 20 years, worked ceaelessly to make that Library a model academic library in 1945 he was invited tothe positions of Honorary Professor of Library Science by the Banaras Hindu University (1944-47) then Delhi University (1947-56) and later the Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC) of the Indian Statistical Institute at Bangalore (1962-1972) . Earlier he was associated with the establishment of such information Institutions as INSDOC (CSIR) , and Documentation Sectional Committee of theBureau of India Standards. New Delhi. He founded the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science in 1963. with the objective of promoting research in library science and dissemination of the research results. He wrote more than 2000 research papers. about 60 books, and founded and edited five periodical publications during his life-time. Ranganathan passed away on 27 september 1972, leaving indelible marks in most facets of library and information science.
