Srinivasa Ramanujan - A Self-taught Genius of Inexplicable Originality
(Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, RKMRC, Narendrapur, Kolkata)

G.H. Hardy (1877-1947), FRS and Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cam bridge University, Ramanujan’s mentor who had directly interacted with his peerless and raw mathematical talent from the closest proximity during Ramanujan’s Cambridge days, once told “It was his insight into algebraic formulae, transformation of infinite series, and so forth, that was most amazing. I have never met his equal, and I can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi.. . . He was by far the greatest formalist of his time. . . .one gift it has which no one can deny— profound and invincible originality. . . He would probably have been a greater mathematician if he could have been caught and tamed a little in his youth. On the other hand he would have been less of a Ramanujan, and more of a European professor, and the loss might have been greater than the gain. . . ”. 

On the occasion of a belated celebration of National Mathematics Day, the birthday of this selftaught legendary son of our soil, the present popular level talk is meant to be a non-technical humble homage to his unsurpassed and tantalizing mathematical skills, that has left the world of mathematics mesmerized with sheer awe for the last hundred years. His typically original ways of doing mathematics, his mathematical thought process has not yet been totally deciphered and his tragic untimely demise, when he was at the peak of his creative genius despite his irrecoverable illness, leaves us to wonder what could have been his further mathematical achievements, had the destiny granted him a longer life! 

Ramanujan left us over one hundred years ago. But he still lives and will continue to live through his immortal work. Indeed, the impact of the unbelievable story of his life as a fountainhead of inspiration on the society as a whole seems to be growing day by day. 

Ramanujans never die.

Rational cube sum problem 
(Dr. Somnath Jha, IIT Kanpur)

A positive integer is said to be a rational cube sum if it can be expressed as a sum of two rational cubes. A classical diophantine problem asks the question: which integers are cube sums ? This problem has a rich history going back to the works of Sylvester, Selmer, Satge and the very recent work of Alpoge-Bhargava-Shnidman-Burungale-Skinner. In this talk we will discuss this problem and indicate its relation with the Selmer groups of elliptic curves. This talk is based on a joint work with D. Majumdar and P. Shingavekar.

CONFERENCE ON ”THE LIFE AND CONTRIBUTION OF SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN” 3.

A glimpse into the mathematical universe of Srinivasa Ramanujan Srinivasa

(Dr. Atul Dixit, IIT Gandhinagar)

Ramanujan is generally considered to be the harbinger of India’s contribution on the world stage in Mathematics in the post-historic period. A pure mathematician of the first order, as G. H. Hardy put it, Ramanujan made monumental contributions in number theory and analysis, more specifically, in analytic number theory and special functions. This talk is focused on some of the brilliant breakthroughs and the giant leaps of imagi nation that Ramanujan made resulting in the fabulous advancement of Mathematics. We will also discuss some aspects of his life as well as certain incidents which have had a profound impact on the contemporary mathematicians as well as those that came later.